First off, hello, long time no see, university happened, a ram chip exploded, etc etc etc. But I have new parts on the way and a whole lot of spare time - and a Raspberry Pi sat on my desk doing nothing.
As mentioned in the main Wren Prototype post, I currently have the machine set up with an AVR microcontroller driving the clock and logging the data bus, which works but isn't ideal. The Pi, however, is much faster and has orders of magnitude more memory, and there's already a Forth for it (
pijFORTHos). It doesn't have quite as many usable GPIO pins on the 26 pin header - 13 compared to 18 on the AVR - but that's still more than enough. If necessary I can solder on the P5 header for another 4 pins.
Software wise, Linux is out of the question. It should be obvious why. Someone has written a Pi logic analyser on Linux before, but half of it is a kernel module. So I thought, why not cut out the middleman, write it in assembly and maybe some C, and operate it from Forth?
My first step is some general housekeeping for pijFORTHos. Fixing up the input subroutines, adding either XMODEM or SD card access so I can actually get at the logs once they're generated, that kinda thing. Maybe I'll get completely sidetracked and end up bringing pijFORTHos up to speed with my own version of Jonesforth. Only time will tell.
As an aside, I wasn't quite sure where to put this post, as it straddles a few categories at once - so I hope general is fine.