Re: what does your Ada + hardware look like ?

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

halfmaddad@gmail.com writes:

> Do you run with an OS ? I know we can run without one but then we lose
> tasking, nested subprograms and exception handling, no?

Not at all.

The pure-GPL AdaCore offering for Cortex-M{3,4,7} comes with a 'full'
version that includes exception handling (but not Ada.Containers); the
'small footprint' version doesn't have exception handling (and obviously
other features, can't recall what).

I have an RTS[1] which currently targets Cortex-M{4,3} (STM32F429I,
Arduino Due), without exception handling but wth some Containers, based
on FreeRTOS. The Arduino port has 13 board-specific files (startup and
interrupts, mainly).

All the above use Ravenscar tasking[2].

> I was wondering about using SPI with a GPIO card but I have not done
> this before. I know there are also USB-GPIO adapters.

You could do a lot worse than the RPi as a controller. I made an I2C
interface[3], particularly for the MCP23017 I/O multiplexer. I never got
round to simulating interrupts (which you'd do via /proc, I think). I
found the Pi didn't offer enough of a challenge, because it runs Debian
(Raspbian) and Ada "just works".

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/cortex-gnat-rts/
[2] http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/12rm/html/RM-D-13.html
[3] https://sourceforge.net/projects/raspi-i2c-ada/