by Fabien Chouteau

49 entries tagged with #drivers
In June of 2021 we announced the launch of a new programming competition called Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Awards. We believe the Alire source package manager is a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use this competition to reward the people contributing to the ecosystem. Today we are pleased to announce the results. But first, we want to congratulate all the participants, and the Alire community at large, for reaching 200 crates in the ecosystem in January of this year. We truly believe in a bright future for the Ada/SPARK open-source ecosystem with Alire at the forefront. Reaching this milestone is a great sign, inside and outside the Ada/SPARK community, of the evolution and the energy of the ecosystem.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
Blaine Osepchuk's project won a finalist prize in the Make with Ada 2019/20 competition. This project was originally posted on Hackster.io here. For those interested in participating in the 2020/21 competition, registration is now open and project submissions will be accepted until Jan 31st 2021, register here.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
Welcome to the Ada for micro:bit series where we look at simple examples to learn how to program the BBC micro:bit with Ada.
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.
Calling all members of the Ada and SPARK community, we are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2018 is here! adacore.com/download
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?
Updated July 2018
Every year, free and open source enthusiasts gather at Brussels (Belgium) for two days of FLOSS-related conferences. FOSDEM organizers setup several “developer rooms”, which are venues that host talks on specific topics. This year, the event will happen on the 3rd and 4th of February (Saturday and Sunday) and there is a room dedicated to the Ada programming language.
SummaryThe Ada IoT Stack consists of an lwIp (“lightweight IP”) stack implementation written in Ada, with an associated high-level protocol to support embedded device connectivity nodes for today’s IoT world. The project was developed for the Make With Ada 2017 competition based on existing libraries and ported to embedded STM32 devices.
SummaryThe 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.
Updated July 2018
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!
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.
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.
If you’ve been looking for a way to start your next embedded project in Ada or SPARK. Then, look no further than the Make with Ada competition!
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.
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.
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.