Category Archives: forth

Moving Forth with Mecrisp-Stellaris and Embello

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In the last episode, I advocated a little bit for Forth on microcontrollers being a still-viable development platform, not just for industry where it’s usually seen these days, but also for hackers. I maybe even tricked you into buying a couple pieces of cheap hardware. This time around, we’re going to get the Forth system set up on that hardware, and run the compulsory “hello world” and LED blinky. But then we’ll also take a dip into one of the features that make Forth very neat on microcontrollers: easy multitasking.

To work!

Hardware

Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth runs on a great number …read more

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Hacking on the Weirdest ESP Module

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Sometimes I see a component that’s bizarre enough that I buy it just to see if I can actually do something with it. That’s the case with today’s example, the ESP-14. At first glance, you’d ask yourself what AI Thinker, the maker of many of the more popular ESP8266 modules, was thinking.

The ESP-14 takes the phenomenally powerful ESP8266 chip and buries it underneath one of the cheapest microcontrollers around: the 8-bit STM8S003 “value line” chip. Almost all of the pins of the ESP chip are locked inside the RF cage’s metal tomb — only the power, bootloader, and serial …read more

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Forth: The Hacker’s Language

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Let’s start right off with a controversial claim: Forth is the hacker’s programming language. Coding in Forth is a little bit like writing assembly language, interactively, for a strange CPU architecture that doesn’t exist. Forth is a virtual machine, an interpreted command-line, and a compiler all in one. And all of this is simple enough that it’s easily capable of running in a few kilobytes of memory. When your Forth code is right, it reads just like a natural-language sentence but getting there involves a bit of puzzle solving.

Forth is what you’d get if Python slept with Assembly Language: …read more

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Browsing Forth

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Forth has a strong following among embedded developers. There are a couple of reasons for that. Almost any computer can run Forth, even very small CPUs that would be a poor candidate for running programs written in C, much less host a full-blown development environment. At its core, Forth is very simple. Parse a word, look the word up in a dictionary. The dictionary either points to some machine language code or some more Forth words. Arguments and other things are generally carried on a stack. A lot of higher-level Forth constructs can be expressed in Forth, so if your …read more

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Interactive ESP8266 Development with PunyForth

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Forth is one of those interesting languages that has a cult-like following. If you’ve never looked into it, its strength is that it is dead simple to put on most CPUs, yet it is very powerful and productive. There are two main principles that make this possible. First, parsing is easy because any sequence of non-space characters makes up a legitimate Forth word. So while words like “double” and “solve” are legal Forth words, so is “#$#” if that’s what you want to define.

The other thing that makes Forth both simple and powerful is that it is stack-based. If …read more

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