Forth Module the Size of a Stick of Gum

Australian engineer [John Catsoulis] developed a small module called the Scamp2 dedicated to running Forth. The focus of his Udamonic project was not only to highlight Forth, but to make a module which was easy to use and doesn’t require any IDE on your computer. According to the website, these modules have found their niche in education as well as rapid prototyping for product development. His site has some good resources, including several Scamp/Forth example applications such as a model train controller or adding a real-time clock module.

The core of the module is a Microchip PIC24F64GB202 MCU with 64K Flash and 8K RAM. Of this, Forth takes up only 20K of Flash and 2K of RAM. [John] is using FlashForth, a version of Forth which came from [Mikael Nordman] at the University of Queensland almost ten years ago. FlashForth has been implemented on a wide variety of PIC and AVR ATmega processors and has apparently developed quite a following in Australia and elsewhere.

We estimate from the photo that the Scamp is about 80 mm long, just slightly longer than a standard piece of MIL-A-A-20175A Type II chewing gum ( 73 mm ). You can use it as-is, or with the header pins installed, the Scamp can be plugged into a breadboard for easy hacking. Regarding the interfacing of Scamp to other equipment, [John] says “Writing software to use other hardware is very easy, and fun.” We like his attitude.

Here is some more information from his Hackaday.io project page, and he also has a Tindie site. If you want a good overview of using Forth in embedded systems, check out Forth: The Hacker’s Language by our own Forth-guru [Elliot Williams]. Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for sending in the tip.