Re: Lua on Microcontrollers

[Jorge <xxopxe@...>]

On 12/10/2013 08:48 AM, John Hind wrote:
> This is interesting:
>
> http://micropython.org/
>
> If only it was Lua! I know there has been some work on this sort of
> thing (i.e. http://www.eluaproject.net/) but nothing as elegant as
> this hardware implementation of Python. Just plug it into any USB
> host computer and edit the scripts as if on a flash drive, whilst a
> virtual com port gives you a console channel over the same USB.

That's exactly what I get with eLua and a MBED[1] board :)


> The main issue for these single chip systems is RAM - typically at
> the highest end you are working with 100-200KiB of RAM and 1-2MiB of
> Flash. This is plenty for a basic "bare metal" Lua implementation

The MBED is a Cortex-M3 with 64kb RAM and 512kb flash. And yes, RAM is 
an issue.

To be honest, what distressess me most from this board is the cost: 
around 50 us$. At that price, my question is why not use a RPi or Beagle 
Bone plus a cheap microcontroller (say, a PIC18) for extending the IO.



Jorge
[1] mbed.org