AdaCore Blog

28 entries tagged with #GPS

by Juan Zamorano

Using Ada for a Spanish Satellite Project

I am an Associate Professor at Polytechnic University of Madrid’s (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid / UPM) in the Department of Architecture and Technology of Computer Systems. For the past several years I have been directing a team of colleagues and students in the development of a UPMSat-2 microsatellite. The project originally started in 2013 as a follow-to the UPM-SAT 1, launched by an Ariane-4 in 1995.

by Arnaud Charlet

How Do We Use CodePeer at AdaCore

A question that our users sometimes ask us is "do you use CodePeer at AdaCore and if so, how?". The answer is yes! and this blog post will hopefully give you some insights into how we are doing it for our own needs.

by Rob Tice

SPARKZumo Part 2: Integrating the Arduino Build Environment Into GPS

This is part #2 of the SPARKZumo series of blog posts. This post covers the build system that was used to build the SPARKZumo project and how to automate the process in GPS.

#GPS #Python #Libadalang #Arduino #CCG

by Fabien Chouteau, Yannick Moy, Vasiliy Fofanov, Nicolas Setton

A Modern Syntax for Ada

One of the most criticized aspect of the Ada language throughout the years has been its outdated syntax. Fortunately, AdaCore decided to tackle this issue by implementing a new, modern, syntax for Ada.

#Ada #GPS #Language

by Rob Tice

SPARKZumo Part 1: Ada and SPARK on Any Platform

So you want to use SPARK for your next microcontroller project? Great choice! All you need is an Ada 2012 ready compiler and the SPARK tools. But what happens when an Ada 2012 compiler isn’t available for your architecture?

#CCG #SPARK #Arduino #RISC V #embedded

by Fabien Chouteau

Ada on the micro:bit

Updated July 2018

#embedded #Ada #nRF51 #ARM

by Yannick Moy

For All Properties, There Exists a Proof

With the recent addition of a Manual Proof capability in SPARK 18, it is worth looking at an example which cannot be proved by automatic provers, to see the options that are available for proving it with SPARK. We present three ways to complete a proof beyond what automatic provers can do: using an alternative automatic prover, proving interactively inside our GPS IDE, and using an alternative interactive prover.

#SPARK #Formal Methods

by J. German Rivera

Make with Ada 2017- A "Swiss Army Knife" Watch

Summary The Hexiwear is an IoT wearable development board that has two NXP Kinetis microcontrollers. One is a K64F (Cortex-M4 core) for running the main embedded application software. The other one is a KW40 (Cortex M0+ core) for running a wireless connectivity stack (e.g., Bluetooth BLE or Thread). The Hexiwear board also has a rich set of peripherals, including OLED display, accelerometer, magnetometer, gryroscope, pressure sensor, temperature sensor and heart-rate sensor. This blog article describes the development of a "Swiss Army Knife" watch on the Hexiwear platform. It is a bare-metal embedded application developed 100% in Ada 2012, from the lowest level device drivers all the way up to the application-specific code, for the Hexiwear's K64F microcontroller. I developed Ada drivers for Hexiwear-specific peripherals from scratch, as they were not supported by AdaCore's Ada drivers library. Also, since I wanted to use the GNAT GPL 2017 Ada compiler but the GNAT GPL distribution did not include a port of the Ada Runtime for the Hexiwear board, I also had to port the GNAT GPL 2017 Ada runtime to the Hexiwear. All this application-independent code can be leveraged by anyone interested in developing Ada applications for the Hexiwear wearable device.

by Yannick Moy

Applied Formal Logic: Searching in Strings

A friend pointed me to recent posts by Tommy M. McGuire, in which he describes how Frama-C can be used to functionally prove a brute force version of string search, and to find a previously unknown bug in a faster version of string search called quick search. Frama-C and SPARK share similar history, techniques and goals. So it was tempting to redo the same proofs on equivalent code in SPARK, and completing them with a functional proof of the fixed version of quick search. This is what I'll present in this post.

#Dev Projects #Formal Verification #SPARK

by Pierre-Marie de Rodat, Nicolas Setton

GNAT GPL 2017 is out!

For those users of the GNAT GPL edition, we are pleased to announce the availability of the 2017 release of GNAT GPL and SPARK GPL.

by Yannick Moy, Nicolas Roche

A Usable Copy-Paste Detector in A Few Lines of Python

After we created lightweight checkers based on the recent Libadalang technology developed at AdaCore, a colleague gave us the challenge of creating a copy-paste detector based on Libadalang. It turned out to be both easier than anticipated, and much more efficient and effective than we could have hoped for. In the end, we hope to use this new detector to refactor the codebase of some of our tools, and we expect to integrate it in our IDEs.

#Libadalang #Static Analysis #refactoring

by Anthony Leonardo Gracio

GPS for bare-metal developers

In my previous blog article, I exposed some techniques that helped me rewrite the Crazyflie’s firmware from C into Ada and SPARK 2014, in order to improve its safety.

#GPS #Embedded Development #Makers

by Pat Rogers

Getting started with the Ada Drivers Library device drivers

The Ada Drivers Library (ADL) is a collection of Ada device drivers and examples for ARM-based embedded targets. The library is maintained by AdaCore, with development originally (and predominantly) by AdaCore personnel but also by the Ada community at large. It is available on GitHub and is licensed for both proprietary and non-proprietary use.

#Ada #Devices #drivers #STM32 #embedded

by Raphaël Amiard, Yannick Moy, Pierre-Marie de Rodat

Going After the Low Hanging Bug

At AdaCore, we have a strong expertise in deep static analysis tools (CodePeer and SPARK), and we have been relying on the compiler GNAT and our coding standard checker GNATcheck to deal with more syntactic or weakly-semantic checks. The recent Libadalang technology, developed at AdaCore, provided us with an ideal basis to develop specialized light-weight static analyzers. As an experiment, we implemented two simple checkers using the Python binding of Libadalang. The results on our own codebase were eye-opening: we found a dozen bugs in the codebases of the tools we develop at AdaCore (including the compiler and static analyzers).

#Static Analysis

by Raphaël Amiard, Pierre-Marie de Rodat

Introducing Libadalang

AdaCore is working on a host of tools that works on Ada code. The compiler, GNAT, is the most famous and prominent one, but it is far from being the only one. At AdaCore, we already have several other tools to process Ada code: the ASIS library, GNAT2XML, the GPS IDE. A realization of the past years, however, has been that we were lacking a unified solution to process code that is potentially evolving, potentially incorrect Ada code. Hence Libadalang.

by Johannes Kanig

SPARK and CodePeer, a Good Match!

It turns out that the CodePeer engine can be used as a powerful prover for SPARK programs. This feature will be available in the next version of SPARK Pro, make sure you try it out!

#Formal Verification #SPARK

by Emmanuel Briot

Integrate new tools in GPS (2)

Customizing build target switches In the first post in this series (Integrate new tools in GPS) we saw how to create new build targets in GPS to spawn external tools via a menu or toolbar button, and then display the output of that tool in its own console, as well as show error messages in the Locations view.

by Emmanuel Briot

Integrate new tools in GPS

This blog, the first in a series, explains the basic mechanisms that GPS (the GNAT Programming Studio) provides to integrate external tools. A small plugin might make your daily workflow more convenient by providing toolbar buttons and menus to spawn your tool and parse its output.

by Emmanuel Briot

GNAT On macOS Sierra

GNAT and all the tools work great on the newly released macOS Sierra, but gdb needs some tweaking of the system.

by Emmanuel Briot

Debugger improvements in GPS 17

The GNAT Programming Studio support for the debugger has been enhanced. This post describes the various changes you can expect in this year's new release of GPS.

by Emmanuel Briot

GNAT Programming Studio (GPS) on GitHub

The GPS source repository has been published on GitHub. This post briefly describes how you can access it, and hopefully contribute.

by Emmanuel Briot

Bookmarks in the GNAT Programming Studio (GPS)

As we improve existing views in GPS, we discover new ways to use them. This post shows some of the improvements done recently in the Bookmarks view, and how you can now use it as a TODO list.

by Yannick Moy

GNATprove Tips and Tricks: User Profiles

One of the most difficult tasks when using proof techniques is to interact with provers, in particular to progressively increase proof power until everything that should be proved is proved. Until the last release, increasing the proof power meant operating on three separate switches. There is now a simpler solution based on a new switch --level, together with a simpler proof panel in GPS for new users.

#Formal Verification #SPARK

by AdaCore Admin

AdaCore Tech Days 2015

#AdaCoreTechDay #GNAT Pro #CodePeer #SPARK Pro #SPARK #QGen

by Olivier Ramonat

AdaCore Releases GNAT Pro 7.3, QGen 1.0 and GNATdashboard 1.0

February saw the annual customer release of a number of important products. This is no mean task when you consider the fact that GNAT Pro is available on over 50 platforms and supports over 150 runtime profiles (ranging from Full Ada Support to the very restricted Zero Footprint Profile suitable for safety-critical development). All in all, from the branching of the preview version to the customer release it takes us nearly 4 months to package everything up! Quality is assured through the internally developed AdaCore Factory.

#GNAT Pro #SPARK Pro #GPS #GNATbench #GNATdashboard #Ada #AdaCore Factory #CodePeer #QGen

by Tristan Gingold, Yannick Moy

Tetris in SPARK on ARM Cortex M4

Tetris is a well-known game from the 80's, which has been ported in many versions to all game platforms since then. There are even versions of Tetris written in Ada. But there was no version of Tetris written in SPARK, so we've repaired that injustice. Also, there was no version of Tetris for the Atmel SAM4S ARM processor, another injustice we've repaired.

by Yannick Moy

Using Coq to Verify SPARK 2014 Code

In the first release of SPARK 2014, GNATprove only provided support for automatic provers, in particular Alt-Ergo. Automatic provers are very handy when it comes to perform a big numberof simple proof. But they can fail to prove valid formulas when the proof involves some advanced reasoning. As mentioned in a previous post, one check left unproved might invalidate assumptions on which are based the proofs of multiple other checks. This is a case where manual proof may be useful for SPARK 2014 users. The development version of GNATprove now supports Coq to perform manual proof.

#Formal Verification #SPARK

by Yannick Moy

Project Hi-Lite Wrap-up

After three years of hard work, we have reached last week the end of project Hi-Lite, whose goal was to simplify the use of formal methods. We're proud to publicize the results obtained, in particular the new version of SPARK and the associated tool GNATprove. Here's a summary of the wrap-up meeting.

#Formal Verification #SPARK