Turnkey Forth on MCU development
For Scamp
First off, the customer service from John is second to none. He promptly answers emails and is always willing to help with any questions. The courier destroyed part of my first shipment (they ran it over!) and John shipped out replacements promptly. The Scamp itself is well put together and conceived: A nice layout and high quality components and board. As far as the Scamp itself, I'm new to Forth and development on MCUs. There are a couple of other options such as Mecrisp-Stellaris on RP2040 and FlashForth on Arduino. The difference between those two and the Scamp is that the Scamp is a turnkey development board whereas the other two are not, and adding the most basic functionality to them (such as serial communication) instantly turns them into a breadboard-bound Frankenstein's monster. In the former two cases you will need to install Forth on them yourself, get yourself some sort of serial to TTL converter (not to mention any sort of LEDs for debugging) and do a lot of hunting around to try to cobble together various bits of code in order to be able to implement basic GPIO/UART/I2C/SPI/PWM/etc functionality: all left as the proverbial exercise to the reader and all undocumented. With the Scamp, you have UART, I2C, SPI, and PWN apis right out of the box. Not to mention an extremely useful LED array and temperature sensor both with words defined. The LED array in particular is invaluable for "headless" debugging and operation. Additionally, the Udamonic site contains full documentation. If you're considering doing Forth development on an MCU then look no further!
