Contents
The system requirements for pbForth are absolutely minimal - that's
because the Forth language was designed back in the 60's and 70's.
In those early days of computing, a 16MHz processor with 32K of RAM
was unheard of, and now you can hold one in your hand. Once the firmware
is loaded into the brick, all you need to be able to do is send plain text
to the tower over the serial port.
One of the main reasons that you might consider using pbForth is that
the common script language is independent of the host it is running
on. That means that you can use a Windows PC, Linux, or even a Mac to
control the RCX. I have written a GUI that you can use to control the RCX.
It is written in TclTk, which is a language that can run on all three platforms.
Some of the newer laptop and desktop machines no longer have serial ports - they
use USB ports instead. In fact, Version 2.0 of the Mindstorms kit comes with a
USB tower. I'm happy to report that the latest version of pbForth supports the
USB tower under Windows. Support for Mac OS9/OSX and Linux will come if I get
requests for it.
You will need the following items to start programming your RCX using pbForth:
- Firmware Downloader
- When you first power up the RCX, it runs software burned into the microprocessor.
This is the "fixed firmware" that bootstraps the rest of the system. If you
were using the RCX-Code environment, you would load the standard firmware
from LEGO into the brick.
- To make things easier and platform independent, I've written a simple GUI
that lets you upload new firmware to the brick, upload scripts, and download
firmware images from the brick. Of course, there's also a console that you
can use to test and debug your code right on the brick.
- For those of you that don't want to use the GUI, there are other firmware
uploaders you can get from the web, and they are described in the platform-specific
sections.
- Terminal Emulator
- Once the firmware is loaded into the RCX, you'll need a simple terminal
emulator to communicate with it. The GUI interface for pbForth has a terminal
emulator built-in.
- Back in the old days, a computer was a huge box
in a super-clean air-conditioned room with a bunch of technicians. Naturally,
users were not allowed anywhere near the computer and had to communicate with it
using a terminal. These terminals looked a lot like the all-in-one computers we
have today, of which the iMac is the most familiar example.
- A terminal emulator is a piece of software that runs on your computer that
makes it look like one of those old terminals. Each of the platform-specific
sections has a suggestion for a terminal emulator that is known to work with
pbForth. You can also use the GUI that has the terminal emulator built in.
If you have your own terminal emulator and firmware download mechanism, or if you
just need an update of the current firmware and example scripts, then grab the
pbForth Scripts as a zip archive or
pbForth Scripts as a tar.gz archive.
Either way, the current pbForth SREC file (along with the servo and DCC enabled versions)
is in the root of the archive.
Most users will be programming under Windows 95/98/2000/XP. As far as I know,
Tcl runs on all of these platforms.
Previous versions of pbForth required a separate installation of Tcl, but thanks to the
magic of tclkit, the current pbForth GUI
is a self-contained executable file.
You'll still need the pbForth Scripts as a zip archive or
pbForth Scripts as a tar.gz archive to get the scripts
that go with the HowTo documents and current pbForth images.
You can optionally get the current pbForth source
as a zip file if you really want to see how pbForth is put together.
Put the .exe in its own directory and unzip the pbForth scripts to the same place
to make things easier later.
For those of you that are lamenting the fact that LEGO has left Linux users
high and dry, there is pbForth for Linux. You will need:
Active State Tcl for Linux. You can probably use the
Tcl that comes with your Linux distro if it less than 2 years old - unless it's RedHat 9.
You'll need the current pbForth GUI as a tar.gz file
You can optionally get the current pbForth source
as a zip file if you really want to see how pbForth is put together.
I only have a Mac 8500 machine at home for testing. I'm only running MacOS 9.2
so the software I recommend is:
SourceForge Tcl 8.3.3 for MacOS as a bin file
The current pbForth GUI as a zip file
You can optionally get the current pbForth source
as a zip file if you really want to see how pbForth is put together.
You will also need a copy of the Serial Port OSAX
and a copy of Apple's Serial Tool
Unfortunately, I do not have easy access to an OS-X machine, and besides
they don't generally have serial ports. Any donations of an iBook or tiBook
would be welcome :-)
