Controlling an Arduino from GForth

I have been working recently on a way to control my Arduino Uno from GForth, and it is turning out pretty awesome. I've written a sketch for the Arduino that reads simple commands over the serial bus, performs their action (using a large switch statement) and returns a result. From the computer one can type something like "13 HIGH digitalWrite" to turn the LED on, or "10 arduinoMalloc" to allocate memory and get the address of the allocated block.

This project has come out of my failed attempts to write a Forth to run *on* the Arduino. Instead of accepting that the limited resources on the device restrict what you can do, I decided that it would be nicer to use a much more powerful computer and a fully general programming language and treat the Arduino as a peripheral that can be commanded. This lead me to the command-reponse protocol I've implemented.

Of course, you have the full power of Forth, so you can do anything you want, but the functionality that the Arduino currently exposes this way is: reading and writing SRAM, reading and writing EEPROM, allocating and freeing memory, setting the mode of a pin, reading and writing digital pins, reading and writing analog pins, delaying by a given number of microseconds, generating random numbers and random numbers from a given range, and setting the baud rate of the usb connection. This is pretty much all the functionality I can test right now without finding some hardware, but it is really easy to add new commands so I certainly will expand this set when I can think of something to add (suggestions?).

The tool as its stands only works in Linux (I had some trouble on Windows, but I may come back to it) and can take a device name and baud rate on the commands line. There is also a command line switch to compile and upload the current version of the command interpreter to the Arduino. Once started it is simply the GForth interpreter with some words for sending the commands mentioned above, as well as error handling on both the Arduino and the GForth side of things.

The Arduino sketch will currently reject invalid commands, invalid command lengths, and invalid arguments with an error code. The GForth side throws an exception explaining the problem and printing the result given (the length received by the Arduino in the case of an invalid length, for example). The Forth words that send commands will also check if the command has been defined yet, and will complain if it doesn't understand the result the Arduino sends back.

There are at least two ways I can think of this program being useful. First is to command the Arduino to do something complex or that may change over time or depends on information available to a laptop, say, but not the device. I'm hoping to think of a project like this to demo. The second use is in the fact that the whole thing occurs in the serialEvent function. This means that if you have a main loop that does something with the Arduino, but you would like to debug you program at runtime with a full interactive programming language that can peek and poke memory and sample inputs and outputs, then you can send commands at any time to do this. I feel like this might even be the most useful application, but I don't have anything right now that needs this kind of interactivity.

Things I would like to add- 32 bit arguments (currently everything is 16 bits), saving commands to eeprom to read at startup, control structure commands, grouping commands to send all at once instead of one at a time, some way to register commands to run repeatedly so you don't have to keep sending them, and an assembler that uploads to flash or eeprom and reads the uploaded program at startup. I think this might be one of the cooler applications- you could program in assembly on the Arduino and still use sketches, and without overwriting the bootloader. This relies on being able to write to pages of flash, and I don't know how to do that yet, but still a cool idea.

Thats it for now. This project so far has been very pleasant and opened me up to how nice Forth can be if you use the Forth Foundation Library. I have had some bugs, but interactive debugging and a quick testing cycle has made them much easier to track down then I would have expected. As usual with my posts- I hope to write more about this soon!