Re: Ada on Raspberry Pi: new article in MagPi issue 8

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com> writes:

> On 2012-12-02, Rego, P. <pvrego@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I had a very happy surprise today when I opened the MagPi issue 8 and found
>> the Ada article "Beginning Ada" by Luke Guest. And it's the second part,
>> started in issue 6 (which I had not read til today...). Congratulations!
>
> Thanks, the idea was to get Ada into the minds of kids reading that magazine
> as an additional language and to prove it can be used for beginners with no
> programming experience whatsoever.
>
> I'm also trying to think of a good project to document in the next articles, I
> have two ideas, but not sure about them. The aim would be to show the use of:
>
> 1) packages
> 2) possibly separates for platform dependencies
> 3) GNAT project files & Makefiles
> 4) Representation clauses for mapping to hardware or C API's
> 5) Maybe tasking
>
> Any ideas? It has to have a cool factor. Mine are:

The one I'm having fun with is an interface to I2C, targeted at the
MCP23017 I/O expander.

"Writeup": http://raspi-i2c-ada.sourceforge.net/
Code tip:  https://sourceforge.net/p/raspi-i2c-ada/code/ci/e83f5cbe29602a7f306dcd917d8d79c61d7c6399/tree/

At the moment it detects input changes via polling; I'm working on an
interrupt-driven variant (the nearest to interrupt-driven you'll get in
userland, anyway, I think) but I haven't pushed those changes yet.

The "interrupt" changes will be based on WiringPi at
https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-pi/wiringpi/ and will effectively
provide an Ada interface to GPIO - I'm trying to avoid too much direct
work with GPIO in case I let the magic smoke out.

Work is a tad held up due to illness; hopefully both I and the work are
on the road to recovery!