Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[John Kern <jkern3@NOSPAM.visteon.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> I'm taking a look at the PC/104 card info from: http://www.pc104.org/ It
> looks interesting, but as far as I can tell, you'd probably have some
> retargeting issues for GNAT no matter what you did. And of course, embedded
> programming is more than finding GNAT and RTEMS for some target hardware -
> you really need a lot of additional software for it to be useful. From the
> hardware side, you'd need to have some basic electrical things like A/Ds,
> D/As, (F/Ds, maybe?) discretes & ports that would be useful for student
> projects and representative of real-world development.
> 
> I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think of
> any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
> fuss, let me know... Thanks.
> 


A readily available computer that comes to mind would be a Palm OS
computer of some kind.  It may be a tricky to demonstrate the real-time
aspects, but the embedded parts should still be similar to the kinds of
things needed for SBCs, ie. memory maps, low level key debouncing,
display memory map, etc.  There is an unused on-board microphone on my
Visor.  The people at the Mathworks have a Stateflow code generation
demo at:
http://www.mathworks.com/company/digest/december00/codegen.shtml
They even indicate that the processor is a Motorola 68328 for which a
GNAT port might already exist.