Re: Ada on embedded devices (Was: Ada on Nintendo DS ?)

[Brian Drummond <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk>]

On Thu, 03 May 2012 14:37:28 +0200, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> Brian Drummond wrote:

> You might want to follow the AVR-Ada mailing list/newsgroup
> (nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.comp.hardware.avr.ada), even if your primary
> embedded platform is a different one.

Thanks. Once I figured out that I just had to add news.gmane.org as a new 
newsserver in Pan, I looked at this and it is very useful. 
At some stage I ought to condense the problems I found with GCC4.7 and 
post there.

> I have a selection of different embedded devices here on my desk.  All
> of which I intend to program in Ada at some point.
> 
>  + MSP430 (TI Launchpad) - GCC but no Ada reported yet (according to
>    Google).

Agreed. At a guess, building GCC with Ada for MSP will be no more than 
usually painful, but writing a minimum RTS (or porting the AVR-Ada one) 
would be a lot of work.

>  + Atmel (Arduino etc.) - AVR-Ada works but without much of a run-time
>    system.
> 
> We are actively using AVR-Ada on a commercial project I'm working on.
Good to know. I have the "Blinky" example running on 3 platforms (Arduino, 
Teensy (where the LED is on a different port) and the Evil Mad Scientist 
breadboard... Working on stepper control through the Arduino MotorShield.

>  + ARM (various boards) - GNAT works (apparently) flawlessly on
>    Debian/Squeeze on Raspberry Pi.  Tero Koskinen is doing some work to
>    get Gumstix modules to the same level of Ada support as the Raspberry
>    Pi.  ACT has a cool demo of GNAT with a Ravenscar run-time running on
>    Mindstorms NXT (I have some LEGO here in the office too ;-).

My R-Pi should be here by the end of June :-)

R-Pi is getting a LOT of publicity at the moment, and it's a shame that 
Ada isn't riding on that wave yet. Especially since Ada has a good role 
as a teaching language, and the R-Pi is marketed as an educational 
product.

Don't forget Android. A touchscreen tablet could replace a lot of 
embedded systems in industry (DRO/CNC readouts/controllers for a start)
Gnatdroid on DragonflyBSD is a good start but its executables are not 
really integrated with the Android system.

> I'll publish build instructions and test results here as I get things to
> work.

Thanks, and ditto if I manage anything useful...

- Brian