rp2040_hal
svd2nim
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rp2040_hal | svd2nim | |
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9 | 7 | |
34 | 17 | |
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7.4 | 4.5 | |
2 months ago | 4 months ago | |
Ada | Nim | |
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License | MIT License |
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rp2040_hal
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Ada targeting RPI
You can go bare metal for the raspberry pico. Maybe it's also interesting to you: https://pico-doc.synack.me/
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New release of vscode extension For Ada 23.0.15
In this release we improved Alire integration. Now you don't need the compiler to be in the PATH (only alr) when you are working with a crate, because Alire will configure it for you. Suppose you setup a crate for Rasperry Pico, if you open it in VS Code, then navigation should work out of the box. Also any Alire configuration is skipped altogether if the VSCode was launched with alr edit or alr exec.
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Any recommendations for a newbie to get into embedded Ada?
If you want a more modern processor, pick the RPI Nano. You find extensive doc here: https://pico-doc.synack.me/
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Using something else than C - neverending problems (AVR/ARM)
Ada on Raspberry Pi Pico website ( https://pico-doc.synack.me/)
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Introduction to Embedded Systems Programming (Ada)
AdaCore's docs are fantastic for understanding why things are done the way they are. However, when I'm learning a new platform or language I prefer to see a lot of practical examples first. That's what I tried to do with my "Ada on the Raspberry Pi Pico" project:
https://pico-doc.synack.me/
- when to choose stm32 MCUs over a raspberry pi Pico ?
- Ada on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 (video presentation)
- An Embedded USB Device Stack in Ada
svd2nim
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Memory-mapped IO registers in Zig. (2021)
Nim's maintainer agrees with you I believe, and the API is as you suggest (volatileLoad and volatileStore): https://nim-lang.org/docs/volatile.html
However, under the hood, Nim compiles to C. So these are macros that typecast to volatile, does the read (or write), then casts back to non-volatile.
(Small plug for my nim project that is somewhat related to OP: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim)
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New embedded programming language with C as a host language
C++ has decent industry acceptance in embedded nowadays, or at least that has been my impression.
After C++, rust is likely the most popular, quite a lot of effort has been put into running rust on embedded, see eg https://github.com/rust-embedded. However, once again to my understanding, industry acceptance is still highly marginal.
After that, there's a bunch of toy-ish efforts to run other languages. Zig, nim, python and javascript variants, etc. Usually anything that has C ABI compatibility should be possible to get up and running (without writing a compiler backend from scratch). I've had fun with some toy projects using nim for ARM cortex-M targets (https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim, https://github.com/auxym/nim-on-samd21, https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/picostdlib).
Using Nim (and eg svd2nim to generate the equivalent of CMSIS headers for register access in pure nim), it would be entirely possible to write even the low level stuff (SPI drivers and whatnot) in 100% nim, with the same performance as C and better safety (better static type system and compile-time checks, etc). Runtime (eg overflow) checks and garbage collection are available (at the cost of some performance) but optional. See eg. a pretty basic higher-level API for GPIO access, that provides native performance, since the abstraction is implemented as macros (compile-time abstraction): https://github.com/auxym/nim-on-samd21/blob/master/src/port....
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specify address of a variable
Any chance your MCU is ARM? If so check out my project to generate the register mappings from CMSIS SVD files: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim
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Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
To be clear: Ratel isn't my project, just something I'm following due to interest.
In the interest of shameless self promotion :), my own experimentations are :
https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim
https://github.com/auxym/nim-on-samd21
And I've used and contributed to picostdlib (https://github.com/beef331/picostdlib), the rp2040 support library.
All just as a hobby, but it's interesting to learn that some companies are actually looking into Nim for firmware! Embedded seems like such a slow moving industry. I believe the author of Nesper and Nephyr also developed them for professional work.
- Ask HN: What's Your Side Project?
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An Embedded USB Device Stack in Ada
Many vendors provide svd files which describe the hardware registers. It's possible to convert the svd automatically like they do for C. Here's an example for Nim [1]. Rust has one as well.
Though I agree that MCU's currently involve a lot of busy work. It's why I'm working on building a nice system building on Zephyr using Nim [2]. It's pretty great to write a few dozen lines of concise memory safe code to do somethinguseful, and then be able to run it on dozens different MCUs.
It'd be great if there was more Ada core in these systems, as Zephyr is all built in C. At least it's modern clean C and well tested.
1: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/svd2nim
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Writing embedded firmware using Rust
If you're curious, I have this in MVP status at the moment: https://github.com/auxym/svd2nim
What are some alternatives?
pico_examples - Ada examples for the Raspberry Pi Pico
probe-run - Run embedded programs just like native ones
usb_embedded - An Ada USB stack for embedded devices
picostdlib - Nim wrapper for the raspberry pi stdlib
AdaDoom3 - Id Software's Id-tech-4-BFG in the Ada programming language.
kcgi - minimal CGI and FastCGI library for C/C++
nephyr - Nim wrapper for Zephyr
BBS-BBB-Ada - A collection of Ada sources for working with Linux based embedded computers, such as the BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi
dotfile - Simple version control made for tracking single files
ada_language_server - Server implementing the Microsoft Language Protocol for Ada and SPARK
stm32f429i-disc - Rust BSP crate for the STM32F429I-DISC development board