Forth is an interactive and extensible language, with built-in lexical analysis (tokenizer, parser) and interpreter/compiler, needs less than 20 KiB Flash and 4 KiB RAM, unbelievable for a self-contained (self-hosted) system.

Forth is perfect for embedded systems where some sort of user interactivity like CLI and extensibility (at runtime) are needed.

C & Forth in the 21st Century. C and Forth are both about 50 years old. To combine the strength of this two worlds results in a powerful system that outperforms other much newer systems like Python. Good design withstands the test of time.

The goal of Mecrisp-Cube is to be a complete Forth programming environment for STM32 MCUs. There are three flavors available:

• MecrispCubeWB (BLE) for the STM32WB55 Nucleo Board and dongle and variants for the Firefly, Katydid, Discovery and the STM32WB Feather Dev Board. In work STM32WB Flipper Zero
• MecrispCubeF405 for Adafruit's Feather STM32F405.
• MecrispCubeH74x for STM NUCLEO-H743ZI and Arduino Portenta H7 Development Board.

Sources on GitHub. See ForthSTM32WB for standard Mecrisp-Stellaris for the STM32WB.

Features

USB, BLE (for STM32WB55) and other Middlewares

STM32 Forth without BLE, USB, Filesystems, RTOS etc. is not complete, to build this in Forth by myself from the scratch overwhelms me. I would like to go the reverse way and use the STM tools like CubeIDE, HAL, CubeMX and integrate the Mecrisp-Cube Forth into it. Forth as an interactive extension for the STM32 ecosystem. Mecrisp-Cube Forth is running as a CMSIS-RTOS thread.

Already done

Integration in STM32 Cube Ecosystem

• Integrated in STM32 Cube ecosystem.
• Create C code from CubeMX for internal peripherals and use it in Forth.
• Calling C Functions from Forth and vice versa

RTOS

• Forth as CMSIS-RTOS thread.
• CMSIS-RTOS API to use FreeRTOS from Forth.
• Buffered terminal I/O (5 KiB buffer for UART Rx). Interrupt driven and RTOS aware, key and emit block the calling thread.

USB Device

• USB-CDC Device for serial communication via USB. Redirect console I/O like cdc-emit, cdc-key
• USB-MSC Device: The USB mass storage device class (also known as USB MSC or UMS). You can use your Forth system as a flash drive (also thumb drive [US], memory stick [UK], and pen drive/pendrive elsewhere) with two LUNs: 0 for flash disk, 1 for microSD disk.

Filesystem

• microSD and internal Flash mass storage for blocks and FAT filesystem.
  • Filesystem API
  • UNIX like Shell commands
• vi Editor origin in BusyBox tiny vi. Workflow development: begin Edit EVALUATE while SaveFile repeat

Board Support Package (BSP)

• Onboard LEDs: LED1 (blue), LED2 (green), LED3 (red)
• Switches: SW1, SW2, SW3
• Digital port pins: D0 to D15
• Analog port pins: A0 to A5
• PWMs
• Input capture, Output compare
• SPI (e.g. for display, memory)
• I2C: (external peripherals e.g. pressure)
• Real Time Clock (32 bit UNIX time stamp, valid times are from 1.1.2000 to 31.12.2099 because of the STM32WB RTC peripheral) time!, time@, and .time (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS ISO 8601).
• Watchdog
• Assertation and Logging

• BSPs
  • STM32WB55
    • Nucleo STM32WB55
    • Firefly BLE Development Board
    • Katydid Wearable BLE Sensor Board
    • STM32WB5MM Discovery Kit
    • STM32WB Feather development board
    • Flipper Zero
  • Adafruit Feather STM32F405
  • NUCLEO-H743ZI
  • Arduino Portenta H7

BLE

• BLE 5.0 GAP Peripheral Role (STM32WB)
  • DIS Device Information Service
  • HRS Heart Rate Service (heart rate depends on A0 for Nucleo and A2 for Dongle)
  • CRS Cable Replacement Server service (proprietary service from STM, similar to Classic Bluetooth SPP). Redirect console I/O like crs-emit, crs-key.

Floating-Point Unit

• Support for the floating-point unit FPU, single precision for M4F MPUs and double precision for M7 MPUs
• CMSIS-DSP

External Peripherals (e.g. Feather Wings)

• OLED Display 128x32, 128x64, I2C
• E-Ink FeatherWing 250x122 SPI
• NeoPixel
• CharlieWing
• NeoPixelWing
• DotStarWing
• Quad Alphanumeric FeatherWing Display

Documentation

• Markdown manual pages

Planned

• Command line editing like Gforth no longer needed, see EditorVi
• VIS: VOCs, ITEMs and STICKY Words (Forth Namespaces and Context Switching based on VOCs, ITEMs and STICKY Words)

• BLE 5.0 GAP Peripheral Role (STM32WB)
  • BLE Event driven programming like LAIRD's smartBASIC, WAITEVENT ONEVENT.
  • BLE GATT (Characteristics, Services, Profiles)
  • Current Time Service
• BLE 5.0 GAP Central Role (STM32WB)
  • Scan, Connect, Pairing (Bonding)
  • Cable Replacement Client CRC
  • HID profile (keyboard)

• Adafruit Sharp Memory-in-Pixel LCD MIP

• Low power
• Integration of FFL - Forth Foundation Library http://irdvo.nl/FFL/index.html https://github.com/irdvo/ffl

• UML state machine (extended state machine, hierarchically nested states), see Finite State Machine module in the ffl
• Thread (network protocol)
• SQLite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite
• SSH https://www.oryx-embedded.com/pdf/CycloneSSH_Datasheet.pdf

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8422287/how-to-call-c-functions-from-arm-assembly
• https://static.docs.arm.com/ihi0042/g/aapcs32.pdf

• ForthCalculator

Built With

• STM32CubeIDE is an all-in-one multi-OS development tool, which is part of the STM32Cube software ecosystem. The IDE is used for development, GCC tools are included. Eclipse is not my favorite preferred development environment. I would like to replace it with VS Code and makefiles. VSCodeCubeMX
• STM32CubeMX is a graphical tool that allows a very easy configuration of STM32 microcontrollers and microprocessors, as well as the generation of the corresponding initialization C code for the Arm® Cortex®-M core or a partial Linux® Device Tree for Arm® Cortex®-A core), through a step-by-step process.
• STM32CubeProg is an all-in-one multi-OS software tool for programming STM32 products. the Java GUI does not work for me, but the CLI does. See STM Wiki

21st Century Forth

http://www.forth.org/svfig/21st.html

What's good about Forth

• small
• easy to understand
• extendable
• adaptable to programmer
• interactive
• open compiler/interpreter
• simple architecture
• source code available
• helpful in learning about hardware and software

What's bad about Forth

• NIH (not invented here)
• cryptic reverse polish notation
• difficult to learn
• documentation sometimes lacking or unavailable
• unconventional syntax
• no linkage with other languages
• getting more complex
• lack of data typing
• source (proprietary protection problem)

What 21st Century Forth should be

• work in embedded applications
• work with networks and Internet
• work with large systems (operating systems, graphic user interface)
• be able to be taught to programmers and engineers

What Forth needs

• reuseable binaries (other languages & headers)
• more/better/useable libraries
• safety (year 2000)
• better documentation
• more examples
• workable standards
• better gui/window editor w/more information
• package confidence
• more debugger integration
• works with newer CPUs (embedded systems, MCU)
• publications
• big daddy $$$
• educational opportunities
• more types of multitasking/multiprocessing pre-emtive multitasking

21st Century Forth desires and vision

• real/virtual machines/core
• scriptmaking (language to taste)
• real compile toggle (memory, speed, optimization)
• integratable applications
• "browser" environment *
• environments (such as voice) interpretation (fuzzy)
• pda's bases, smart cards, etc
• servants (robots, etc) applications

Forth 2012

• https://forth-standard.org/standard/words
• http://www.forth200x.org/documents/forth-2012.pdf

Copyright

Authors

• Matthias Koch - Forth on ARM Cortex M0/M4 - Mecrisp Stellaris
• Peter Schmid - Initial work - Mecrisp-Cube

License

This project Mecrsip-Cube is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Mecrsip-Cube is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Mecrsip-Cube. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Acknowledgments

• http://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/ Original Mecrisp project, Matthias Koch
• https://mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc.sourceforge.io/ Mecrisp Stellaris Unofficial UserDoc, Terry Porter
• https://jeelabs.org/article/1612b/ Forth in 7 easy steps, Jean-Claude Wippler
• https://forth-ev.de/ Forth-Gesellschaft e.V.
• https://forth-ev.de/wiki/res/lib/exe/fetch.php/vd-archiv:4d2015-arm.pdf ARM-Sonderheft
• https://www.freertos.org/index.html FreeRTOS Real-time operating system for microcontrollers
• https://docs.tinyusb.org/en/latest/ TinyUSB
• http://elm-chan.org/fsw/ff/00index_e.html FatFs - Generic FAT Filesystem Module