Following are Mahlon Kelly's comments on his experiences with New Micro's 100 Squared board and the Rockwell 65F11 Forth chip. Date: 05-30-86 (22:52) Number: 1763 To: ALL Refer#: NONE From: MAHLON KELLY Recv'd: (N/A) Subj: ROCKWELL CHIP, ETC. Sec'ty: PUBLIC MESSAGE Yesterday I received the 100 squared board from New Micros, Randy Dumpse's company. It uses the Rockwell 65F11 Forth chip, and is a complete Forth-based micro intended for oem development in such areas as machine control, data acquisition, etc. I am going to be configuring it as a 16 channel, 12 bit programmable data acquisition system, with data going to battery backed RAM. The board is 10 cm on a side (thus 100 [mm] squared), and with the two a/d boards, will fit in a 10 x 10 x 10 cm cube. OIIt's a really impressive device for what it is intended to do. I am going to make a data acquisition system that will collect 16 channels of data at half-hour intervals and store it in the battery-backed RAM. Should be able to take care of a week's data. The whole thing, including power from a motorcycle battery, will be in a watertight housing and submerged in the lake. If anyone's interested in the saga of this project, say so, and I'll give periodic updates. Date: 06-02-86 (01:21) Number: 1805 Some have expressed an interest in my experiences configuring New Micro's 100 squared board as a data logger. Here's the first installment. The 100 squared is a 10 cm square board with 8 chips plus an 8k ROM containing a Forth development system and two sockets for additional 2 or 8k memory chips. The memory chips can be PROMs, with a variety being accepted, or RAM. There is an RS-232A port, two 8 bit parallel i/o ports, and points for 7.5 to 17+ VAC or DC power input. Also a jack for +5 regulated DC power and 20 V vpp for the PROMs. There is a bus on which other boards can be stacked; I will be stacking 2, 8 channel, 12-bit a/d converter boards for the data logger. The idea is then to store the data in battery-backed RAM chips (the RAM is bank selected, by the way) which can be pulled in the field and be brought back to the lab and interrogated. Or, since the board is only $240, the whole thing can be brought back and replaced with another. This will make a package 10 cm on a side and about 3 in thick which can be powered with an 80 amp-hr battery for about a week in the field, logging data (temp, oxygen, ph in water) every half hour, taken in at 1 min intervals, smoothed, and converted to "real" values by the small computer. Getting the board up is simplicity itself. Plug in a terminal (I am using my Columbia with Perfect Link), set the com specs at 1200 baud, 2 stop bits, no parity, hit the reset button, and you see the Rockwell Forth prompt. You now are interactively programming it in Forth. Oh, I forgot to mention the most important thing --- it uses the Rockwell 6511 or 6512 Forth chip as its processor. That's a 6502 configured to use Forth instead of assembler as its main language. There is also a Forth assembler in the development ROM, along with other utilities. Rather impressive to be programming a 10 cm square board in that way. The Forth is a modified FigForth, with some nice development tools in the ROM. Documentation on the language, provided in a manual by Rockwell is impressive. New Micro's documentation, although complete, is not for the novice. I had to call them for several points of clarification on, for example, the power supply and on bank selecting th e RAM chips with software. Turns out that if one of the lines of a parallel port is jumpered to a point on the board called E10, then bringing that port low sends banks in the second RAM. If port B is used, then PB ! selects the lo and hi's on the port, 0 being lo. Thus PB @ 2 BASE ! 11111110 AND PB ! would select the second RAM. But there are words to do it automatically, and to then store data or fetch it. Thus 255 0 BANKC@ would do a C@ from the second RAM and return to the first, where presumably one's language is. BANKC! does the opposite; and BANKEXECUTE will execute a definition in the second RAM. Using the BANKC! and BANKC@ stuff lets such things as BANKCMOVE be defined, so that data can be brought into an array, say, in the main RAM and moved to the second bank for storage. Enough (or perhaps too much) for now. I'll tell more as I work on the thing. Date: 06-03-86 (03:37) Number: 1824 The 100 squared board has a provision for handshaking (x-on x-off) when uploading programs from another machine. Not blocks, just thinks that what is coming in is being typed on a remote terminal. Thus I can send source files to it from the PC via the RS-232 port. At least that's the theory. I haven't gotten that far yet. You can download memory either by doing C@s and EMITs to the RS-232 or by vectoring output. Of course the program to do the downloading has to be in the 100 squared, but that's no problem. With the bank switching scheme you can, in theory, have up to 4 meg available. But there are sockets on board for only 16k. Shouldn't be too much of a problem to mount more sockets in the prototype area, however. Randy Dumse tells me that a change would be needed in the prom that controls the addressing. There is also provision for piggybacking a disk controller board onto it. But somehow using disks with a machine that is 10 cm on a side seems silly. There is provision for disk i/o in the development rom (BLOCK, SCR, LIST, etc.) but when used without the controller they seem to lock the system. The theory behind the board, of course, is that it is for oem development, and thus the limited memory. One of the nicer things to do would be to use it as a data logger and dial it up with an auto-answer modem to dump the logged data as needed. Since I'll be using it in a remote location, there'll be no phone lines, but I think I'll write the software to do that anyway. One could also have it autodial and periodically give a report on what it's doing. All sorts of possibilities.