Once I finally understood what a Benito board was, I started thinking "well, that's pretty neat, but it lacks any ADC on-chip; otherwise it would make a nice replacement for the Arduino, at a fraction of the price".

Well, clearly Don (a fellow dorkbotpdxer) has similar ideas.

But it doesn't end there. I'm currently exploring the idea of using Freescale's S08JM family of USB microcontrollers - in part because they are retro & nostalgic (for me - I wrote my first program for the 6800), and in part because they are true von Neumann machines (one memory space for both code and data), rather than Harvard machines like their AVR and PIC competitors. A true Harvard architecture makes interactive Forths difficult to write, since RAM is always in data space, and Flash is in code space. For interaction I want to be able to execute code out of RAM - but I can't.

There are some serious downsides to using these Freescale parts. First, Freescale's toolchain - the bloated Codewarrior - while free is not open source, and is Windows-only. Second, there isn't a single piece of cheap hardware - like the AVR Dragon or PICkit2 - that can program all of Freescale's HC08 parts. Each family has its own DEMOxxx board, and each one costs $50. There is a nifty thing called the USBSPYDER08, but it only works with lowest-end parts - not with the JM family.

Wondering about this once again, I did the following Google search: "open source hc08 tools" and landed on a Freescale forum devoted to the OSBDM08 - an "open source programming cable". Sadly, it seems to be supported only under Codewarrior. But, rather interestingly, the latest thread is by "Brad R" who "writes Forth compilers" and is interested in Linux support for the OSBDM08!

This is, of course, none other than Brad Rodriguez, long-time Forth author and explainer, who created the CamelForth series of 8-bit Forths.

Pretty cool.