by Emma Adby
25 entries tagged with #drivers
by Jon Andrew
CuBit: A General-Purpose Operating System in SPARK/Ada
Last year, I started evaluating programming languages for a formally-verified operating system. I've been developing software for a while, but only recently began work in high integrity software development and formal methods. There are several operating system projects, like the SeL4 microkernel and the Muen separation kernel, that make use of formal verification. But I was interested in using a formally-verified language to write a general-purpose OS - an environment for abstracting the underlying hardware while acting as an arbiter for running the normal applications we're used to.by Johannes Kliemann
Ada on the ESP8266
Not long ago, AdaCore published its LLVM frontend for GNAT. Also quite recently Espressif updated their LLVM backend to LLVM 9 which also happens to be the LLVM version of GNAT. This gave me to the idea to try out if LLVMs promise of providing modular and reusable toolchain technologies is true.by Pat Rogers
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.
by Fabien Chouteau
Ada on a Feather
I was quite happy to see AdaFruit release their first Feather format board including a micro-controller with plenty of Ada support, the STM32F4. I bought a board right away and implemented some support code for it.by Boran Car
Bringing Ada To MultiZone
C is the dominant language of the embedded world, almost to the point of exclusivity. Due to its age, and its goal of being a “portable assembler”, it deliberately lacks type-safety, opening up exploit vectors. Proposed solutions are partitioning the application into smaller intercommunicating blocks, designed with the principle of least privilege in mind; and rewriting the application in a type-safe language. We believe that both approaches are complementary and want to show you how to combine separation and isolation provided by MultiZone together with iteratively rewriting parts in Ada. We will take the MultiZone SDK demo and rewrite one of the zones in Ada.by Emma Adby, Fabien Chouteau
GNAT Community 2018 is here!
Calling all members of the Ada and SPARK community, we are pleased to announce that GNAT Community 2018 is here! adacore.com/download
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?
by Fabien Chouteau
Ada on the micro:bit
Updated July 2018
by Manuel Iglesias Abbatermarco
Make with Ada 2017- Ada Based IoT Framework
Summary The 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.
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 Jonas Attertun
Make with Ada 2017: Brushless DC Motor Controller
This project involves the design of a software platform that provides a good basis when developing motor controllers for brushless DC motors (BLDC/PMSM). It consist of a basic but clean and readable implementation of a sensored field oriented control algorithm. Included is a logging feature that will simplify development and allows users to visualize what is happening. The project shows that Ada successfully can be used for a bare-metal project that requires fast execution.by Fabien Chouteau
Ada on the first RISC-V microcontroller
Updated July 2018
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 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.
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 AdaCore Admin
Introducing the Make With Ada competition!
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!
by Fabien Chouteau
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.
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 Jérôme Lambourg
Porting the Ada Runtime to a new ARM board
A step by step tutorial to adapt the ARM runtime to new MCUs/boards.by Florian Schanda
SPARK 2016 Supports Ravenscar!
The new big feature of the SPARK 2016 release is the support of the Ravenscar profile. Users can now use protected objects and tasks to write concurrent code. On uniprocessor computers the toolset can ensure that no deadlocks or data races will occur and that no tasks will terminate. Read this blog post to learn more and see the new feature in practice.by Fabien Chouteau
Make with Ada: Formal proof on my wrist
When the Pebble Time kickstarter went through the roof, I looked at the specification and noticed the watch was running on an STM32F4, an ARM cortex-M4 CPU which is supported by GNAT. So I backed the campaign, first to be part of the cool kids and also to try some Ada hacking on the device.by Anthony Leonardo Gracio
How to prevent drone crashes using SPARK
The Crazyflie is a very small quadcopter sold as an open source development platform: both electronic schematics and source code are directly available on their GitHub and its architecture is very flexible. Even if the Crazyflie flies out of the box, it has not been developed with safety in mind: in case of crash, its size, its weight and its plastic propellers won’t hurt anyone! But what if the propellers were made of carbon fiber, and shaped like razor blades to increase the drone’s performance? In theses circumstances, a bug in the flight control system could lead to dramatic events. In this post, I present the work I did to rewrite the stabilization system of the Crazyflie in SPARK 2014, and to prove that it is free of runtime errors. SPARK also helped me to discover little bugs in the original firmware, one of which directly related with overflows. Besides the Crazyflie, this work could be an inspiration for others to do the same work on larger and more safety-critical drones.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.