Re: Interfacing Ada With Full Runtime Directly to Electronic Chips

[philip.munts@gmail.com]

On Monday, January 2, 2017 at 3:42:06 AM UTC+1, pat...@spellingbeewinnars.org wrote:
> Hi Everyone
> 
> Happy New Year!
> 
> Ada-AVR is a neat project and I am not knocking it. It doesn't have tasking support yet but this is of course a huge job.
> 
> If I want to connect any sort of computer running Linux directly to a circuit using "full Ada" with tasking support what are my options?
> 
> By circuit, I mean a variety of electronic components and in this case with no microcontroller, an A/D chip is a simple example.
> 
> I am thinking that single board computers like BeagleBone are my best bet, they have plenty of GPIO lines.
> 
> Has anyone interfaced directly with chips via SPI or IC2 via a GPIO PCI card or GPIO-USB adapter ?
> 
> Is there any other options?
> 
> Thanks-Patrick

I suggest my own Linux Simple I/O Library (http://git.munts.com/libsimpleio).  It provides Pascal calling sequence wrappers around the Linux system calls for I2C, SPI, UART, and raw HID devices and includes some shim packages for GNAT.

I have tested it with both native and cross compilers on the BeagleBones Black and Green and Raspberry Pi 2 and 3.  I use it mostly with the Raspberry Pi 2 cross toolchain (which also works fine for the BeagleBone family) from AdaCore and targeted to my own embedded Linux distribution called MuntsOS (http://git.munts.com/arm-linux-mcu).

I also have a collection of packages and example programs for various Mikroelektronika click boards and Raspberry Pi hats that are not published yet.  I am in the middle of writing a paper about this very topic.

Phil