Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Marc Pelletier]

Hello all,

I am planning a realtime application for data acquisition on a pc104 
platform and investigating my OS options. I'm normally a delphi programmer, 
and rather than the pain of boning up on my very poor C/C++ skills, I would 
like to learn ADA for this project. Can someone please point me to some 
links which outline the pros and cons of the various OS's. I'm sure there 
are numerous I haven't heard of yet.

Of particular interest is availability of device drivers for the various 
OS's.  We need a/d converters, serial cards, gps cards... the usual stuff.

Also any background info I should read before starting in on ADA would be 
great.

thanks

Marc Pelletier
Goldak Exploration

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Stephane Richard]

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"Marc Pelletier" <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in message
news:Xns941E8F4D03B96mpgexx2@216.168.3.44...
> Hello all,
>
> I am planning a realtime application for data acquisition on a pc104
> platform and investigating my OS options. I'm normally a delphi
programmer,
> and rather than the pain of boning up on my very poor C/C++ skills, I
would
> like to learn ADA for this project. Can someone please point me to some
> links which outline the pros and cons of the various OS's. I'm sure there
> are numerous I haven't heard of yet.
>
> Of particular interest is availability of device drivers for the various
> OS's.  We need a/d converters, serial cards, gps cards... the usual stuff.
>

Here's a first one that takes care of a lot of OS
http://www.parl.clemson.edu/~jranjes/projects/Puma/compare.htm

This one compares Mac OS/X Windows XP and Linux
http://thetechnozone.com/smartbuyersguide/OS_Shootout-2003.htm

Hopefully you'll find your answer in these links as in the specific
information you want to know about

> Also any background info I should read before starting in on ADA would be
> great.

*** Excellent choice :-) if I do say so myself...Hmmmm I just did didn't I?
;-).

>
> thanks
>
> Marc Pelletier
> Goldak Exploration

-- 
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[James Rogers]

Marc Pelletier <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in
news:Xns941E8F4D03B96mpgexx2@216.168.3.44: 

> Hello all,
> 
> I am planning a realtime application for data acquisition on a pc104 
> platform and investigating my OS options. I'm normally a delphi
> programmer, and rather than the pain of boning up on my very poor
> C/C++ skills, I would like to learn ADA for this project. Can someone
> please point me to some links which outline the pros and cons of the
> various OS's. I'm sure there are numerous I haven't heard of yet.

A few years ago I lead a robotic control development effort on a 
pc104 system. We looked at several good OS's. At the time the
OS's with good Ada support were Multi from GreenHills, PharLap
bundled with Aonix Object Ada, and VxWorks used with Object Ada or
Gnat.

We chose the PharLap/Object Ada combination for a number of reasons
including licensing costs. I believe any of these operating systems
offer the features you are looking for.

> 
> Of particular interest is availability of device drivers for the
> various OS's.  We need a/d converters, serial cards, gps cards... the
> usual stuff. 
> 
> Also any background info I should read before starting in on ADA would
> be great.
> 
>

You will want to read some of the online articles and books at
www.adapower.com before starting. Ada looks a lot like Pascal, but has
a lot of features that are different from Pascal. In particular you
will want to study the Ada visibility rules.

Depending upon your design, you also may want to exercise some of the
tasking capabilities of Ada. We certainly used them extensively in the
robotic system. We also used generics, streams, and tagged types.

Jim Rogers

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Martin Dowie]

"James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in message
news:Xns941E98AEE4B8Cjimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1...
> A few years ago I lead a robotic control development effort on a
> pc104 system. We looked at several good OS's. At the time the
> OS's with good Ada support were Multi from GreenHills, PharLap
> bundled with Aonix Object Ada, and VxWorks used with Object Ada or
> Gnat.

Small correction - "Multi" is the Green Hills IDE - it supports numerous
OS, including their own "Integrity" and Wind River's VxWorks.

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Marc Pelletier]

James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in 
news:Xns941E98AEE4B8Cjimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1:

> PharLap
> bundled with Aonix Object Ada

Is Pharlap an rtos? My quick reading of their website seemed to indicate 
that it was a dos extender that made dos "more" realtime. Admittedly that 
may be real enough for my task.

Thanks

Marc Pelletier
Goldak Exploration

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Randy Brukardt]

"Marc Pelletier" <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in message
news:Xns941E9E3E5D94Cmpgexx2@216.168.3.44...
> James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in
> news:Xns941E98AEE4B8Cjimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1:
>
> > PharLap
> > bundled with Aonix Object Ada
>
> Is Pharlap an rtos? My quick reading of their website seemed to indicate
> that it was a dos extender that made dos "more" realtime. Admittedly that
> may be real enough for my task.

It originally was a DOS Extender, but later on there were bare-machine
versions (that is, an RTOS). I have no idea what the current state is,
though.

                  Randy.

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Ed Falis]

As of the last time I looked, maybe 3 years ago, their Embedded ETS 
product was definitely an RTOS, and a nice lean one at that (disclaimer: I 
used to work with them when I was at Aonix).  The DOS-Extender is an older 
product, that I believe was their original.  But they have been building 
the embedded os for quite some time now (~10 years).

- Ed

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[James Rogers]

Marc Pelletier <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in
news:Xns941E9E3E5D94Cmpgexx2@216.168.3.44: 

> James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net> wrote in 
> news:Xns941E98AEE4B8Cjimmaureenrogers@204.127.36.1:
> 
>> PharLap
>> bundled with Aonix Object Ada
> 
> Is Pharlap an rtos? My quick reading of their website seemed to
> indicate that it was a dos extender that made dos "more" realtime.
> Admittedly that may be real enough for my task.
> 

When I worked with it we used the ETS OS, which is clearly an RTOS.
It has a very nice feature. The API is a subset of the WIN32 API.
This means you can do a lot of unit testing on your development
PC before recompiling for the target. This helps speed development
and lowers contention for the development target system.

In 1999 PharLap was working on adding some optional GUI extensions
to ETS. I never used that version.

I liked ETS because we could tailor the complexity and size of the
RTOS. We could use a bare-bones kernel requiring about 6K of memory,
or we could add features such as a full file system, a TCP/IP stack,
and several other interesting drivers. The file system could support
disk-on-chip implementations so that you could treat a ramdisk as
though it was a hard drive. We used a 40Mb ramdisk as though it was
a Win32 file system on a disk drive, including the ability to define
directories as well as files.

The amount of stack space, and the number of tasks supported by ETS
was limited only by the amount of memory on your system. The OS did
not provide hard limits to the number of tasks.

Jim Rogers

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Gautier Write-only]

Marc Pelletier:

> Also any background info I should read before starting in on ADA would be
> great.

As a Pascal programmer you may be interested by
- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/pascada.htm
- http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm#p2ada
HTH
________________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Jeff C,]

"Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:k6gmb.2108$4O1.237@nwrdny01.gnilink.net...
> "Marc Pelletier" <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in message
> news:Xns941E8F4D03B96mpgexx2@216.168.3.44...
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I am planning a realtime application for data acquisition on a pc104
> > platform and investigating my OS options. I'm normally a delphi
> programmer,
> > and rather than the pain of boning up on my very poor C/C++ skills, I
> would
> > like to learn ADA for this project. Can someone please point me to some
> > links which outline the pros and cons of the various OS's. I'm sure
there
> > are numerous I haven't heard of yet.
> >
> > Of particular interest is availability of device drivers for the various
> > OS's.  We need a/d converters, serial cards, gps cards... the usual
stuff.
> >


If you need the largest selection of device drivers then I would consider

Linux      (not really an RTOS, if your requirements are soft RT you can
probably get  by with
               this)
vxWorks (GNAT available, Rational Apex Ada available, Greenhills multi
available)
RT Linux (GNAT for this available http://rtportal.upv.es/apps/rtl-gnat/)

Also take a look at each of the offerings frmo
http://www.lynuxworks.com/

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Marc Pelletier]

Gautier Write-only <gautier@fakeaddress.nil> wrote in 
news:3F99E588.66EC288D@fakeaddress.nil:

> As a Pascal programmer you may be interested by
> 

Wow, 
thanks for all the info. My evenings are booked for the next little while I 
guess.

Marc Pelletier
Goldak Exploration

Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[Colin Paul Gloster]

In article <Xns941E8F4D03B96mpgexx2@216.168.3.44>, Marc Pelletier wrote:

"[..]

Of particular interest is availability of device drivers for the various 
OS's.  We need a/d converters, serial cards, gps cards... the usual stuff.

[..]"

Read up on Ada 95's support for interfacing to C so that you will be able
to use a wide range of device drivers.