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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: e8th prototype hardware!
Date: Thu, 12 May 2016 23:59:46 -0700
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Raimond Dragomir <raimond.dragomir@gmail.com> writes:
> Here are some insights about the e8th board: ..

Oh cool, thanks for this info.  Are you involved with the hw design?

> - Completely industrial temp (-40C..+85C)

Nice!  Despite the name "raspberry pi" you are not supposed to actually
bake them, i.e. the rpi's temp range is much lower.

> - RTC and backup SRAM on a coin CR2032 cell type

This is important for lots of things and I can't understand why so many
otherwise good boards omit it

> - SDRAM 8Mx16 (16MBytes) at 100MHz (on the back side, right under the cpu).
> - 8MBytes quad-spi serial flash.

Cool, any reason to not use a 16mb qspi flash?  They are cheap...  Also
is there any eeprom in the system?  Either on the chip or off.  Even a
smallish amount like a few dozen bytes can be very useful.

> - ethernet 10/100.

Really needed?  I guess it can be useful, and can be turned off to save
power.

> Power supply input: 5VDC only.

Hmm, lipo power would have been useful.

The $0.64 question: consider the loop

  : test 0  begin 1+ again ;

or the 8th equivalent.  I.e. just count upwards forever.

How much power does the board use while this loop is running?  What
about with heavier processing such as crypto or floating point?

> There is an user button and an user led.

Nice.

> The board is not something very special. It is intended to be a simple
> design

I realize these 2 comments are exactly the opposite of each other, but:
1) there are so many boards in this category, why bother with another?

   and

2) this board seems nicely thought out, and gets lots of simple things
right that other boards manage to miss.

Anyway, well done, I could imagine using them for various purposes.