Making an RC Car with Ada and SPARK

As a demonstration for the use of Ada and SPARK in very small embedded targets, I created a remote-controlled (RC) car using Lego NXT Mindstorms motors and sensors but without using the Lego computer or Lego software. I used an ARM Cortex System-on-Chip board for the computer, and all the code -- the control program, the device drivers, everything -- is written in Ada. Over time, I’ve upgraded some of the code to be in SPARK. This blog post describes the hardware, the software, the SPARK upgrades, and the repositories that are used and created for this purpose.

Using Pointers in SPARK

Winning DTU RoboCup with Ada and SPARK

AdaFractal Part 2: Fixed Point and Floating Point Math Performance and Parallelization

In Part 1 of this blog post I discussed why I chose to implement this application using the Ada Web Server to serve the computed fractal to a web browser. In this part I will discuss a bit more about the backend of the application, the Ada part.

There's a mini-RTOS in my language

The first thing that struck me when I started to learn about the Ada programing language was the tasking support. In Ada, creating tasks, synchronizing them, sharing access to resources, are part of the language

Ada on the first RISC-V microcontroller

Updated July 2018

New strings package in GNATCOLL

Simics helps run 60 000 GNAT Pro tests in 24 hours

This post has been updated in March 2017 and was originally posted in March 2016.

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.

Verifying Tasking in Extended, Relaxed Style

Make with Ada: ARM Cortex-M CNC controller

I started this project more than a year ago. It was supposed to be the first Make with Ada project but it became the most challenging from both, the hardware and software side.

SPARK 2014 Rationale: Variables That Are Constant

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.