Re: Very small Python VM for wireless network chips

[David Given <dg@...>]

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steve donovan wrote:
[...]
> It is an EM250 from Ember. Nice hardware, pity about the compiler.
> Usual RAM shortage, only 4K, 127K flash. Most of the flash and 2K of
> the RAM goes for the Zigbee stack, so it's very constrained. Not a
> good prototyping environment!

AAUI, the EM250 uses a XAP2 processor core, and I hear rumours that
Cambridge Consultants have a gcc port. I don't know if it was ever made
available, though.

Incidentally, I'll see your minute-long build cycle and raise you a
24-hour build cycle for the proprietary phone OS I'm working on. The
build process is also a nasty maze of shell scripts, makefiles, windows
batch files, perl scripts and compiled Tk programs that does no
dependency checking, takes ~45 minutes to rebuild even if nothing needs
done, takes ~10 minutes just to link, and nobody --- but *nobody* ---
understands it. It doesn't stop on an error, so the only way I know if
there's a link problem is because ARM's proprietary librarian tool will
crash if given an invalid file and throws up the 'Do you want to report
this error to Microsoft?' dialogue. I am *itching* to throw it all away
and replace it with another build tool, preferably Lua-based. I hear
Prime Mover's nice...

gcc: it sucks. But it sucks *less*.

> Fortunately, for smart zigbee controllers, can use a Gumstix that uses
> the EM250 as a modem. I can then do higher-level networking stuff
> (like ZDO device discovery) in Lua, which is a total pleasure in
> comparison.

A while back Mike Pall pointed me at PicoLua:

http://www.lapsi.eletro.ufrgs.br/~socal/projects/picoLua/

This will translate Lua bytecode into PIC machine code, although it
doesn't get you features like tables, closures, garbage collection etc.

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