Customer Comments
Salvatore
Turnkey Forth on MCU development
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!
Mina J
The documentation alone is worth the price
As a Forth newbie the learning resources on udamonic.com are invaluable. The website and device create an ecosystem of learning and fun.Getting the Scamp3 up and running is a breeze. Following the sites instructions on inputting code, then witnessing the LEDs blink and react for the first time gives the programmer a immense feeling of joy and control. This input / output kept me, a novice, coming back for more. I know I've only scratched the surface of what this amazing little computer can do and I am eager and excited to learn more.
Joe
Great customer service
On the first Scamp3 board that I received, 2 of the onboard LEDs were not working. I contacted the seller, (John) and he got back with me within 2 hours. He offered to send me a new Scamp3, but I wanted to try and fix it and I failed. I contacted John again and he responded within two hours and immediately shipped me out a new board free of charge. The board is well-made with lots of features and I am very happy with it.The customer service is phenomenal!!! I would highly recommend this board to anyone and I will definitely be a customer in the future!!!!
Phil
Scamp is awesome!
I received my Scamp on the Thursday and I've spent the entire week playing with the scamp and my wife now hates you (because I didn't mow the lawns as promised). :)I've been having a ball! - I've never used a PIC before - I've only just started to get into the AVR, after upgrading from Arduino, but had trouble getting FlashForth to work on it. The Scamp just makes it so much easier!Using FlashForth to prod and poke the registers live while I test things out is amazing. I'm already bit banging an LCD display and am starting to get into timers.I'm learning the PIC as well as forth on the bare metal!! It's fun and the Scamp makes it so much easier.
Paul
Developer
I just received this recently, and I am very impressed. It is great to have a FORTH microcontroller board that has 'batteries included'. Many of the FORTH boards and firmware can run FORTH but this product has all of the words included to use all of the features that the board has to offer out of the box. I like the form factor as well as it does not force you to use a breadboard, and not having live pins exposed and the ability to mount the board in your application is something that most others do not offer. Having the LEDs driven by an I2C port expander is great since it does not use up the higher speed GPIOs from the microcontroller. Just starting to work with it, but it is by far one of the best all round solutions for experimenting with FORTH that I have seen.
Shane
Great Product!
I have been experimenting with PICs and Arduino for a number of years now (on and off, certainly no expert) and got this board recommended to me from a friend. Even just reading through John's website (www.udamonic.com) before receiving the Scamp board I got the feeling that Forth "just makes sense".Having received the board I can say it is a quality product and has been fun to use and learn another way to interface with microcontrollers. As other reviewers have mentioned it is a bit of a leaning curve (as with most new things) but even after working through some of the examples on the website I can see great potential.And given its terminal PC interface I have used it to progress my C# learning through making a simple IDE. Shipping was fast, too.Very happy so far!
Piero
Great little device!
I am impressed by the power and the ease of programming available with this little device. FORTH had been created with small-footprint, low-resource applications in mind, and this is a very good implementation. The device is responsive, I haven't managed to find a problem with the implementation of FORTH (well, and even if one of the words I remember or need is absent, FORTH does let you define it yourself). The availability of the source code is yet another huge plus of course, as is the ability to build a "turnkey" system.Somewhere on the Udamonic Web site I managed to find, only once, and I have not been able to find it again, a mention of an even smaller FORTH "engine" for more dedicated applications (something easier to incorporate on a PCB). Maybe he will be kind enough to point me to the specific URL again?On more mundane matters: the devices were carefully packaged, one could almost imagine by loving hands... All in all, a great investment, especially if you are a nostalgic ex-user of FORTH.
Peter
Hits a Forth platform sweet spot!
I looked at Forth briefly in 1982. I read the first half of Leo Brodie's classic book, to see what the fuss was about, but did not pursue it. 38 years later, having used Fortran, Pascal, and C on mainframes and PCs, and C and Circuit Python on microcontrollers, I became motivated to learn Forth and discovered the Scamp. Why was I motivated? When using microcontrollers, I would like to avoid the hassle of writing code, cross-compiling it on a host, fixing compile time errors, uploading the compiled code to the target and then fixing run time errors. A lot of time is spent compiling, uploading and debugging. The Arduino environment reduces but does not eliminate the hassles. Circuit Python eliminates cross-compilation and facilitates debugging, but runs slowly on low end microprocessors, and does not support interrupts. Forth eliminates cross-compilation, supports all of the hardware capabilities of a microcontroller, is very compact, and provides excellent run-time performance. The Scamp hits a sweet spot by using flashForth on a 16-bit PIC24 microcontroller that runs at 32 MHz and provides a comprehensive set of peripherals. The design of the board is well thought out and the quality is decent. Scamp provides an excellent platform for learning Forth. However, a fair amount of work is required to get going. The Scamp documentation provides some getting-started information and a link to the flashForth website, which provides links to tutorials written by Peter Jacobs of the University of Queensland. Someone with no previous background in Forth would need additional background and help. I re-read Leo Brodie's classic introduction, which is available online, and was then accessed other resources. After a while, I grasped the big picture and can implement non-trivial applications. I have the zeal of a new convert, and can understand why Charles H. Moore and other pioneers have persisted so enthusiastically with Forth for the past 50 years. As a historical note: one of the earliest (1974) 8-bit microprocessors was the Simple Cost-Effective Micro Processor (SC/MP) made by National Semiconductor. It was often referred to as the Scamp. It had an integer Basic in 4K of ROM, addressed RAM in 4K blocks, and could communicate with a dumb terminal through a UART. The SC/MP was used in a kit, the MK14, sold by Science of Cambridge, a company run by Clive Sinclair. I built one, and used it for a few weeks until the low-quality tactile hex keyboard expired. I then moved on to 6502 and Z80 class microcomputers that had proper keyboards and used a TV as a display ...
