Green Arrays DevBoards!

 http://www.**--****.com/ 

Little pricey though...

The board as described appears rather minimal, but I don't consider
$400 pricey.  Eval boards are typically several hundred dollars.  It
is the very tiny, very limited EZ type kits that are under $50...
well, given the minimal functionality of this eval board, maybe $400
is a bit high.  It is interesting that it only has EIA-232
interfaces... no USB, no Ethernet, no analog, no nothing other than
three "minimal" serial ports.

The idea of an eval board is to allow an engineer to evaluate the
product in an application context.  With nothing but power and serial
ports, this is not much of an application context.  Maybe they plan to
expand the base board with I/O daughter cards.

Rick

>>>>> "Mux" == Mux  < XXXX@XXXXX.COM > writes:


And not even available for at least half a year:

  "[..] and we expect to have chips available in quantity during the
   second quarter of 2011"

Also the listed price may not apply:

  "The discounted prices shown below apply to the first 25 orders
   received."

Could be a nice alternative to an FPGA development board.  However, as
long as /full/ programming documentation (such as ROM contents) is not
available, it won't be less proprietary than an FPGA.  

And I certainly won't want to program such a device in colorForth using
yet another proprietary IDE, when a portable cross-compiler with more
normal Forth syntax could be written within a few days.

I'm not per se against using a new language like colorForth.  But I like
to have tools properly modularized and interoperable.  Can I interface
colorForth code to subversion?  I guess not.  Can I edit code in my
editor of choice?  I can't.  Can I control compilation using the tools I
know (like GNU make?).  No.

I've had to work with quite a lot of annoying vendor-tools.  Looks like
colorForth/arrayForth takes non-interoperability to a new level.

</rant>

The GA144 chips still let me hope that their extreme simplicity allows
full programming without vendor-tools.  Something that's pretty much
impossible with current FPGAs.

David
-- 
GnuPG public key:  http://www.**--****.com/ ~dvdkhlng/dk.gpg
Fingerprint: B17A DC95 D293 657B 4205 D016 7DEF 5323 C174 7D40

While I can't argue with your last point, the 1st is simply not true.
Subversion can handle binary files fine.  It just can't do diffs
between versions, and personally, I find that objectionable.

I also agree with your 2nd point, and as I find time, I have been
trying to deal with that with a project that you can find at
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
This does not, and will not remove the proprietary nature of the code,
but it does, at least, expose the source to a little more
interoperability.

DaR

Maybe you stopped reading after the second sentance
of the announcement and preliminary documentation
on the EVB-001.

I read that it will have a 40-pin external memory
interface, external SRAM, an SPI flash interface,
external SPI flash, an ANSI Forth in flash, Serdes
connection, Specific I/O connections, Analog terminations,
and prototyping area.  The preliminary documentation
doesn't say much but the page does not say that the board
has nothing but power and serial ports.

Best Wishes

For what's included, I still say it's pricey :-) Like you said, most
FPGA dev-boards in that price range are loaded with SRAM, DRAM, FLASH,
ethernet, etc. A picture's worth a thousand words though... How about
it, GA? :-)

I'm curious if anyone has a "colorblind" syntax that ColorForth source
can be converted to (and back).  I'm not talking about a one-way
conversion (such as to HTML).  I fully expect that any syntax one
comes up with is going to be more verbose and possibly visually
annoying than ColorForth, but having such a syntax (and tool) would be
a big step towards letting people use existing tools they are familiar
and comfortable with.  And for those who have some color blindness or
those who view ColorForth source code as "angry fruit salad", it's an
option that opens development up to more people.

In particular, it would enable using version control systems with
meaningful diffing between versions and it would enable sharing code
easier-- it could be posted in forums and in email.

I don't know if there is a tool available -- colorforthers rarely seem
to bother with those sorts of conveniences, and I can't find the code
that I wrote.

But there is a trivial transform between color and punctuation.  Off the
top of my head:

red word = ": word"
green-yellow transition = "["
yellow-green transition = "] literal"
cyan word = "postpone word" (or "` word" in the HelForth tradition)
white words = "( words )" or "\ words"
magenta word = "variable word"

ANS Forth it ain't, but it's perfectly readable.

I'm probably forgetting a couple of wrinkles, but once you're familiar
with the ColorForth source format it's pretty straightforward.

--Josh

Yes, I read the document, but none of the items you list are external
interfaces.  I would assume the CPU has some means of booting code and
that some sort of boot code would be supplied.  I have not found
"prototyping areas" to be of much use since I stopped using 0.1" DIP
package parts.  I have to say, I don't know what "analog termination"
implies and "specific I/O connections" means nothing to me unless the
I/O type is defined.

So my impression of the board stands.  It is for playing with the
chip, not evaluating it in the context of an application unless that
application is EIA-232 intensive.  This is exactly what TI and other
companies intend with their low end kits such as the $4.30 MSP430
kit.  If Green Array follows that approach at some point they will
offer it for either $144 or $1.44.

Regards,

Rick

In article < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >,




<SNIP>

                                 ^^^^
That must be                     doesn't

The project that I mentioned earlier at
 http://www.**--****.com/ 
does the "colorblind" translation to pure ASCII.  The colorForth
portion is (almost) full round trip, but I have not completed the
machine code translation back to executable format yet.

Your mapping is close to what we started with originally, but it has
expanded over time.

Yellow words get [ ... ]
Blue, grey and unknown get { ... }, which probably aren't fully round
trip yet.

There's also the various number formats to deal with and variable did
not quite map to what magenta do, so we used :#

It is perfectly readable, although significantly more noisy.

DaR

Soooo, anyone up for starting some sort of pool to bring the cost
down?

-Mux

> application unless that application is EIA-232 intensive. 

I don't think the limited I/O of the GA144-1.20 evaluation board is a
big deal.  I've got an $150 (Digikey pricing) XMOS XC-2 evaluation
board on my desk that has not much more-- just a USB port used for
programming and an Ethernet jack.  But what is key is that it also
brings out (nearly) every pin from the XS1-G4 and has a small proto
area.  In our case, the proto area is too small and we made a separate
board for codecs and connectors and other whatnot.  That's reasonable
because to evaluate the XS1-G4 for our applications, we need to
interface to our hardware; I wouldn't expect an evaluation board to
have the specific set of interfaces we use in our industry.

The GA144-1.20 evaluation board preliminary datasheet says the board
will have a prototyping area.  And as long as all the relevant signals
of the GA144 are brought out, that's all I would care about.  It isn't
clear to me what "Minimal RS232 Xcvr" means.  I would hope that it was
little more than a line driver chip and glue because I want to see the
GA144s implement serial communications in software.

What might be a cute idea is to make the GA144-1.20 evaluation board
have the same form-factor as Arduino "shields".  That ecosystem has a
huge variety of I/O boards and being electrically compatible with that
would mean engineers evaluating the GA144 could find most any I/O that
they liked.

I do think the price is a bit high, but my guess is that they don't
expect to be making many of these boards and probably haven't bothered
to cost-optimize them.

In article < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >,



<SNIP>


If it is anything like the Seaforth 232 it will be bit-banging
and a level convertor.

<SNIP>

Groetjes Albert