31 entries tagged with #Space
by Quentin Ochem
Witnessing the Emergence of a New Ada Era
For nearly four decades the Ada language (in all versions of the standard) has been helping developers meet the most stringent reliability, safety and security requirements in the embedded market. As such, Ada has become an entrenched player in its historic A&D niche, where its technical advantages are recognized and well understood. Ada has also seen usage in other domains (such as medical and transportation) but its penetration has progressed at a somewhat slower pace. In these other markets Ada stands in particular contrast with the C language, which, although suffering from extremely well known and documented flaws, remains a strong and seldom questioned default choice. Or at least, when it’s not the choice, C is still the starting point (a gateway drug?) for alternatives such as C++ or Java, which in the end still lack the software engineering benefits that Ada embodies..
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 Joffrey Huguet
Using SPARK to prove 255-bit Integer Arithmetic from Curve25519
In 2014, Adam Langley, a well-known cryptographer from Google, wrote a post on his personal blog, in which he tried to prove functions from curve25519-donna, one of his projects, using various verification tools: SPARK, Frama-C, Isabelle... He describes this attempt as "disappointing", because he could not manage to prove "simple" things, like absence of runtime errors. I will show in this blogpost that today, it is possible to prove what he wanted to prove, and even more.
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 Peter Chapin
Ten Years of Using SPARK to Build CubeSat Nano Satellites With Students
My colleague, Carl Brandon, and I have been running the CubeSat Laboratory at Vermont Technical College (VTC) for over ten years. During that time we have worked with nearly two dozen students on building and programming CubeSat nano satellites. Because of their general inexperience, and because of the high student turnover rate that is natural in an educational setting, our development process is often far from ideal. Here SPARK has been extremely valuable to us. What we lack in rigor of the development process we make up for in the rigor of the SPARK language and tools. In November 2013 we launched a low Earth orbiting CubeSat. The launch vehicle contained 13 other university built CubeSats. Most were never heard from. One worked for a few months. Ours worked for two years until it reentered Earth's atmosphere as planned in November 2015.by Quentin Ochem
Proving Memory Operations - A SPARK Journey
The promise behind the SPARK language is the ability to formally demonstrate properties in your code regardless of the input values that are supplied - as long as those values satisfy specified constraints. As such, this is quite different from static analysis tools such as our CodePeer or the typical offering available for e.g. the C language, which trade completeness for efficiency in the name of pragmatism. Indeed, the problem they’re trying to solve - finding bugs in existing applications - makes it impossible to be complete. Or, if completeness is achieved, then it is at the cost of massive amount of uncertainties (“false alarms”). SPARK takes a different approach. It requires the programmer to stay within the boundaries of a (relatively large) Ada language subset and to annotate the source code with additional information - at the benefit of being able to be complete (or sound) in the verification of certain properties, and without inundating the programmer with false alarms.
by Fabien Chouteau, Emma Adby, Yannick Moy
Learn.adacore.com is here
We are very proud to announce the availability of our new Ada and SPARK learning platform learn.adacore.com, which will replace AdaCoreU(niversity) e-learning platform. Learn all about it in this blog post.by Johannes Kanig
Taking on a Challenge in SPARK
Last week, the programmer Hillel posted a challenge (the link points to a partial postmortem of the provided solutions) on Twitter for someone to prove a correct implementation of three small programming problems: Leftpad, Unique, and Fulcrum.
by Johannes Kanig
Bitcoin blockchain in Ada: Lady Ada meets Satoshi Nakamoto
Bitcoin is getting a lot of press recently, but let's be honest, that's mostly because a single bitcoin worth 800 USD in January 2017 was worth almost 20,000 USD in December 2017. However, bitcoin and its underlying blockchain are beautiful technologies that are worth a closer look. Let’s take that look with our Ada hat on!
by Fabien Chouteau
Ada on the first RISC-V microcontroller
Updated July 2018
by Emmanuel Briot
New strings package in GNATCOLL
This post describes the new GNATCOLL.Strings package, and the various optimizations it performs to provide improved performance.by Jorge Real
Writing on Air
While searching for motivating projects for students of the Real-Time Systems course here at Universitat Politècnica de València, we found a curious device that produces a fascinating effect. It holds a 12 cm bar from its bottom and makes it swing, like an upside-down pendulum, at a frequency of nearly 9 Hz. The free end of the bar holds a row of eight LEDs. With careful and timely switching of those LEDs, and due to visual persistence, it creates the illusion of text... floating in the air!
by Fabien Chouteau, Arnaud Charlet, Yannick Moy
SPARK Tetris on the Arduboy
One of us got hooked on the promise of a credit-card-size programmable pocket game under the name of Arduboy and participated in its kickstarter in 2015. The kickstarter was successful (but late) and delivered the expected working board in mid 2016. Of course, the idea from the start was to program it in Ada , but this is an 8-bits AVR microcontroller (the ATmega32u4 by Atmel) not supported anymore by GNAT Pro. One solution would have been to rebuild our own GNAT compiler for 8-bit AVR from the GNAT FSF repository and use the AVR-Ada project. Another solution, which we explore in this blog post, is to use the SPARK-to-C compiler that we developed at AdaCore to turn our Ada code into C and then use the Arduino toolchain to compile for the Arduboy board.
by Pat Rogers
Driving a 3D Lunar Lander Model with ARM and Ada
One of the interesting aspects of developing software for a bare-board target is that displaying complex application-created information typically requires more than the target board can handle. Although some boards do have amazing graphics capabilities, in some cases you need to have the application on the target interact with applications on the host. This can be due to the existence of special applications that run only (or already) on the host, in particular.
by Quentin Ochem
Unity & Ada
Using Ada technologies to develop video games doesn’t sound like an an obvious choice - although it seems like there could be an argument to be made. The reverse, however, opens some more straightforward perspectives.by Florian Schanda
SPARKSMT - An SMTLIB Processing Tool Written in SPARK - Part I
Today I will write the first article in a short series about the development of an SMTLIB processing tool in SPARK. Instead of focusing on features, I intend to focus on the how I have proved absence of run-time errors in the name table and lexer. I had two objectives: show absence of run-time errors, and do not write useless defensive code. Today's blog will be about the name table, a data structure found in many compilers that can map strings to a unique integer and back. The next blog post will talk about the lexical analyzer.by AdaCore Admin
Provably safe programming at Embedded World
AdaCore continues to build reliable and secure software for embedded software development tools. Last month, we attended Embedded World 2016, one of the largest conferences of its kind in Europe, to present our embedded solutions and our expertise for safety, and mission critical applications in a variety of domains.
by AdaCore Admin
CubeSat continues to orbit the Earth thanks to Ada & SPARK!
Dr Carl Brandon of Vermont Technical College and his team of students used SPARK and Ada to successfully launch a satellite into space in 2013 and it has continued to orbit the Earth ever since! At our AdaCore Tech Days in Boston last year Dr Brandon explained further.
by AdaCore Admin
Embedded Product Line Updates
Embedded products are not stand alone, this allows them to have safety, mission critical and real-time requirements that they wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise. The embedded product line provides analyzable, verifiable, and certifiable software for both static and dynamic analysis tools.
by Jack Mellor
2015: A Space Ada‑ssey
AdaCore has a long history of providing tools and support to develop mission critical applications for Space. Check out this video we made and showed at the conference to see which ones!by Fabien Chouteau
Make with Ada: "The Eagle has landed"
July 20, 1969, 8:18 p.m. UTC, while a bunch of guys were about to turn blue on Earth, commander Neil A. Armstrong confirms the landing of his Lunar Module (LM), code name Eagle, on the moon. Will you be able to manually land Eagle on the Sea of Tranquillity?by Emmanuel Briot
Count them all (reference counting)
Reference countingReference counting is a way to automatically reclaim unused memory. An element is automatically deallocated as soon as there are no more references to it in the program.
by Emmanuel Briot
Larger than it looks (storage pools)
This post shows how to implement a special storage pool that allocates an extra header every time it allocates some memory. This can be used to store type specific information, outside of the type itself.by Karen Mason
What's in the Box?
Forget about the black box - we want you to see what's in the AdaCore box! Our machine room, the life blood of the company, is centered in the office space in a glass box and is pure eye candy for geeks and cable aficionados. The machine room is 204 sq ft (19 sq meters), contains 73 machines (running the gamut from VxWorks, Linux, Windows, Android and more) 1.5 miles of cables and a state of the art fire suppression mechanism! Oh and the modern air intake system gives it a green energy seal of approval. In the unlikely event of a fire; the smoke detectors allow 30 seconds before dispersing an agent called FM200 which will suppress the fire but not damage the equipment. The economizer takes advantage of winters' freeze and draws cool air from the outside to cool the machine room and the heated air is then spilled to common office areas thus reducing heating costs. We're proud to show-off the hardware side of our software!
by AdaCore Admin
Project P Open Workshop
Project-P Open Workshop
by Jamie Ayre
20 years on...
20 Years of AdaCore: Company as Committed as Ever on Safety-Critical Software Solutions
by Lena Comar
ProofInUse is coming!
For lovers of verification tools and critical system (we know you're out there!), we are very excited to present ProofInUse!