After my previous post on delimiter-free languages it occurred to me that the idea of txtzyme has merit for communication between some of the devices I have to hand.
Some while ago I spent some time producing some bare-metal code examples for the Raspberry Pi (flashing morse code, GPIO control and uart stuff, for example), but never got much further before being distracted by the idea of building a bare-metal operating system and programming language. The basic bare-metal platform which I produced should not need much change to implement some of the basics of txtzyme. Digital pins, console input/output, and microsecond timing are already there, and a few other features can easily be added.
Even more interesting would be the idea of implementing the same concept on the range of other odd boards. The ability to hook them up in arbitrary networks and patterns, while using the best I/O and CPU features of each board seems pretty nifty.
No time to work on this right now, sadly.
Quick2Wire have also had a similar idea – you definitely ought to check out https://github.com/quick2wire/quick2link
(haven’t got round to looking at it myself)
Thanks Andrew. I hadn’t noticed that one.
Frank,
This is probably ancient history, but it was Romilly Cocking of Quick2Wire who gave a talk in mid-May 2013 to OSHUG , about txtzyme. He wanted to try to use an Arduino as an I/O board for a Pi – but found txtzyme too restricting – in the original Ward Cunningham guise.
It was Romilly’s talk that inspired me to look further and see how I could adapt txtzyme to make it a lot more useful.
I have implemented my version on mostly STM32F ARM M3, M4 and M7 dev boards – some purchased and some pcbs that I have produced in small volume.
A recent offering is my PiAno Forte board – that holds a STM32F373 and acts as an I/O slave for the Pi – it’s in PI-HAT pcb format. The STM32F373 is interesting as it has 3 independent 16 bit SD-ADCs on chip (ideal for 3 phase current measurements).
I recently ported Txtzyme to a 216MHz STM32746 M7 dev-board of my own design – which I hope to use in a hybrid combination of ARM M7 and Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA.
You might be interested to know that several of the STM32F series are now programmabe using “Arduino” code in an updated Arduino IDE. They can be bootloaded over a simple serial UART connection. See http://www.stm32duino.com/
I like the STM32F – because the dev boards (Nucleo, Discovery are very low cost) and come with a ST-Link V2 programmer – all for under a tenner :) In my day job, I have designed 4 products based on the STM32F.
I am growing increasingly distracted by FPGAs, soft cores, and more to the point , open source FPGA toolchains like Project IceStorm
Here Jame’s Bowman talks about how IceStorm is an end to end FOSS solution for (some Altera) FPGAs. Open source software, running on open source soft core, programmed with open source tool chain.
http://excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html#j1aswapforth
regards