From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,1a44c40a66c293f3 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!wns13feed!worldnet.att.net!208.49.83.146!uns-out.usenetserver.com!news.usenetserver.com!pc03.usenetserver.com!news.flashnewsgroups.com-b7.4zTQh5tI3A!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Preferred OS, processor family for running embedded Ada? References: <1172192349.419694.274670@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1172239820.896603.222120@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> From: Stephen Leake Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 05:45:37 -0500 Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.3 (windows-nt) Cancel-Lock: sha1:w9qj627n0CufAw2uBBQ8cInPdAQ= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: abuse@flashnewsgroups.com Organization: FlashNewsgroups.com X-Trace: 8e36245e01752759e00d427736 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9481 Date: 2007-02-24T05:45:37-05:00 List-Id: "Mike Silva" writes: > As this is just a hobby/learning thing at the moment, $10k is way, > way too much. I'd like to keep the cost including SBC under, say, > $1000. Do I dream the impossible dream? I hope not, because I'd > really like to give this a try and perhaps learn enough to use > embedded Ada commercially down the line (at which time somebody else > could fork up the $10k). My main job at work is building a satellite simulator (GDS; http://fsw.gsfc.nasa.gov/gds/). It's a hard real-time system. Some people would say it's not "embedded" because it has an ethernet connection to a sophisticated user interface, but that's another discussion. I develop all of the software for GDS on Windows. I've written emulation packages for some of the hardware. I do this because it's easier to debug top level code without the hardware getting in the way, and the development tools (Emacs, GNAT, gdb) work better on Windows than on the target OS (Lynx). Once it's working on the emulator, then I run it on the real hardware. Sometimes it Just Works, sometimes I have to get out the scope and see what's going on. In that case, I try to fix the emulator so I won't have to use the scope again :). Using the scope can be fun, but it's always way slower than using gdb or higher-level tests. So I suggest you take a similar approach. Make up some hardware that you'd like to play with, and write an emulator for it. Then write some code to make that hardware dance. You can do all of that on free software and cheap hardware. If I was hiring (which I'm not), I'd look for someone who can implement algorithms from simple problem descriptions. That's my biggest need. Understanding how to use a scope to debug hardware problems is also good, but not as important. It's easier to learn that on the job. If you want to expand into "real hardware", there are data acquistion and control devices that plug into PCI slots, and come with Windows drivers. I don't use them, but I think they are fairly inexpensive. Anything for Windows is going to be the cheapest solution, because of economies of scale. And they are "real-time" enough to get your feet wet. Another area to explore is FPGA programming. We use small FPGAs on an IP bus carrier (http://www.acromag.com/functions.cfm?Category_ID=24&Group_ID=1) to interface to our hardware. There is a free "Web" version of Alterra Quartus (https://www.altera.com/support/software/download/sof-download_center.html), or the open-source ghdl VHDL compiler/simulator (http://ghdl.free.fr/). FPGA development relies heavily on simulation, which does not require real hardware. If you are ambitious, you can try to tie the ghdl simulator to your Ada code, to allow testing the Ada interface to the FPGA in simulation. I haven't done that yet, but I wish I could. Someone who can do both Ada and VHDL would be a very valuable person! -- -- Stephe