p24/CPU24 CPU for agricultural project

[mfany...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I need to know the stingy licensing issues that I would face in case I decided to use the p24/CPU24 for agricultural projects. Much of the documentation of the two CPU's is available online and I might just be able to fabricate both of the designs using silicon.I live in Africa and I am really interested in testing out a few ICT ideas to support the Agricultural industry locally.

I have goggled around and no one has done any practical work using forth for Agriculture and I have a few applications that would really be interesting for a low power fast CPU such as the p24.

I am not yet talking business since all I need to know is how licensing works on patented designs in the U.S since the p24/cpu24 do not have an international patent and they seem to be a derivative of the mup21 ..etc ... it gets really weird following up on who owns what , short of designing my own forth CPU I would first like to have all my options laid out.

Thanks for your help.

[JUERGEN]

I would be careful with this product as it is not visible on Dr. Ting's offete enterprises http://www.offete.com/disks.html.
As soon as you use a microcontroller and Forth in SW, then all of these issues nearly disappear.
There are a few Forth cores around, J1, J1a and J1b, ep32 for Lattice ...
The market you are aiming at has probably not the highest speed requirements, so a Forth running on a micro is the low cost alternative, so to mention MPE Forth and FORTH INC on the commercial side - and many other implementations that are FOC, some even from the commercial suppliers.
The approach I would suggest: Define the target application and then a system that is fast enough using a microprocessor.
To go for a custom processor where the IO is not fully defined yet, might probably be an expensive approach needing very deep pockets - and time.
I am sure Forth has been used in this area as well, some people on clf might be able to give you some pointers.

[foxaudio...@gmail.com]

Since we are talking about agriculture I wrote the code for this machine in the 1990s and it's still in use. I know a newer version was created for the 68HC12 by my friends at Microtronix but the video is showing an older machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD6nHBVyOuY


It ran on an 8Mhz 68HC11, 16K ROM,8K RAM using an timer interrupt for the electric eyes that count the birds, and 3 other tasks running cooperatively. The robotics control for the boxes, re-directors and vaccine hood, the front panel keypad and GAS plasma display task and a subset of the Forth interpreter was running via RS232 or RS422.

It also has a simple database that kept a record of the "FLOCKS" (incubator output) of birds that were counted for the each shift.

The original SPEC was to count 40,000 per hr with 99.9% accuracy. (1 in 10,000)
We eventually got it up to 90,000/hr with some signal processing improvements in the ISR for the counting signals.

It was running a very traditional ITC Forth system but I used assembler words here and there to speed up critical operations. The ISR was 100% assembler.

Not sure what you are doing, but this gives you a view of what can be accomplished using Forth methodology even with low resources.

With today's optimizing Forth compilers and amazing hardware I can't imagine requiring a custom CPU.


By the way. I am vegetarian now. :-)

BF

[Jason Damisch]

On Monday, August 24, 2015 at 7:41:04 PM UTC-7, foxaudio...@gmail.com wrote:

> By the way. I am vegetarian now. :-)
>
> BF

Hey, maybe there could be a robot in some tofu making equipment
someplace. The down side is that you replace a hippie. But,
then again, maybe the hippie would rather just watch tv and eat
potato chips all day. :^/