Ada on ARM Cortex-M

Ada on ARM Cortex-M

[Maciej Sobczak]

I'm pleased to announce that the tutorial titled "Ada and SPARK on ARM Cortex-M" got its second edition:

http://inspirel.com/articles/Ada_On_Cortex.html

The tutorial was extended and now targets four popular development boards:

- Arduino M0 (or Genuino Zero)
- Arduino Due
- STM32 Nucleo-32 (with F0 chip)
- STM32 Nucleo-144 (with F7 chip)

The tutorial explains how to write Ada/SPARK programs with zero run-time, without any underlying layers and based solely on the information from chip reference documentation.

Source code for all examples, for all of these boards, is also available.

Your feedback is welcome.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com

Re: Ada on ARM Cortex-M

[Simon Wright]

Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm pleased to announce that the tutorial titled "Ada and SPARK on ARM
> Cortex-M" got its second edition:
>
> http://inspirel.com/articles/Ada_On_Cortex.html
>
> The tutorial was extended and now targets four popular development boards:
>
> - Arduino M0 (or Genuino Zero)
> - Arduino Due
> - STM32 Nucleo-32 (with F0 chip)
> - STM32 Nucleo-144 (with F7 chip)
>
> The tutorial explains how to write Ada/SPARK programs with zero
> run-time, without any underlying layers and based solely on the
> information from chip reference documentation.
>
> Source code for all examples, for all of these boards, is also available.
>
> Your feedback is welcome.

Excellent!

I think the Arduino Due watchdog issue[1] deserves a mention?

[1] http://forward-in-code.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/arduino-due-and-watchdog.html

Re: Ada on ARM Cortex-M

[Maciej Sobczak]

> I think the Arduino Due watchdog issue[1] deserves a mention?
> 
> [1] http://forward-in-code.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/arduino-due-and-watchdog.html

Yes, indeed!
Unfortunately, the tutorial does not have a dedicated chapter devoted to watchdogs, but this issue is what can make it more difficult for beginners to understand what is going on with their projects and I personally fell victim of this as well. Definitely, worth mentioning at least in the closing "Loose Ends" chapter.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com

Re: Ada on ARM Cortex-M

[Jeremiah]

On Wednesday, March 30, 2016 at 9:13:17 AM UTC-4, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> I'm pleased to announce that the tutorial titled "Ada and SPARK on ARM Cortex-M" got its second edition:
> 
> http://inspirel.com/articles/Ada_On_Cortex.html
> 
> The tutorial was extended and now targets four popular development boards:
> 
> - Arduino M0 (or Genuino Zero)
> - Arduino Due
> - STM32 Nucleo-32 (with F0 chip)
> - STM32 Nucleo-144 (with F7 chip)
> 
> The tutorial explains how to write Ada/SPARK programs with zero run-time, without any underlying layers and based solely on the information from chip reference documentation.
> 
> Source code for all examples, for all of these boards, is also available.
> 
> Your feedback is welcome.
> 
> -- 
> Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com

I'm a bit late to the party, but wanted to say thanks for this resource.  It really helped me get started working on my SAML21 (cortex m0+).  

One minor comment:
In the sections where you start showing gcc commands, you might consider making another note about the RTS here or perhaps another example.  When I was going through the examples using the arm-eabi-gcc commands and such, I immediately started hitting errors about not having system.ads.  It took me a bit to realize this was because GNAT GPL 2015 doesn't come with a default RTS for the arm-eabi cross compiler calls so you have to specify an RTS (which none of the examples address directly).  I know you mentioned needing an RTS in the first section, but for someone new, knowing this is where you might be specify it for the cross compiler would be useful.  If you are compiling native, I realize this isn't an issue, but wanted to toss that out there for the cross compile folks.

Anyways, thank you for the amazing work.