Forth: Nokia LCD (finale)

I got my Forth green square.

Bas’ and my LCD driver for the PCD8544 display is now in the upstream Embello repository. The API it exports to the graphics.fs library is just three words:

: putpixel ( x y -- ) ;
: clear ( -- ) ;
: display ( -- ) ;

Of course, there’s quite a bit under the hood. putpixel was challenging and he fact that dup dup and 2dup do very different things was time consuming to find, but now it’s done.

I love this environment and have given AmForth a go on a spare Arduino Uno. Using AmForth as a read-eval-print-loop allowed for interactively exploring an STP16CL596 (16 bit shift register / current sink) hooked up to a common anode LED matrix (5x7).

It’s slow. Way slower than Mecrisp, but then the CPU is 8bit instead of 32bit and the clock is only 16MHz instead of 72Mhz, so that’s to be expected really. It’s still as low level though, let’s set PORTD pins 2 through 6 to output, then turn on PD2

$7C DDRD c!
$4 PORTD c!

Okay, so this is just the same as

DDRD = 0x7c;
PORTD = 0x4;

in C, but the important part is there was no compilation step inbetween - just poke bits of RAM and see what happens - if anything goes wrong, just hit reset and try again.

Unfortunately the speed is an issue. Bas plans to drive the matrix display with persistence of vision, and neither of us thinks we can optimise the Forth enough to make that work at just 16Mhz.

Back to C, it is.