Re: Lua on Microcontrollers

eLua on a Cortex-M4 like this (http://hackaday.com/2013/08/07/a-5-arm-development-board/) DIY USB thumbdrive based on a Freescale Cortex-M4, with ability to access all peripherals, and all for $5 seems absolutely mouthwatering !

The Cortex-M4s were meant to be nearing (and sometimes exceeding) the ARM7TDMI's (which could run uCLinux) in terms of compute power, though still MMU-less. So, I'm guessing that it'd be possible to use eLua meaningfully on these.

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 6:53 PM, Michael Richter <ttmrichter@gmail.com> wrote:

The STM32*Discovery boards are both cheaper than that and, in the case of the F3 and F4 boards, more capable boards. Perhaps making such an environment for the STM32F4DISCOVERY or STM32F3DISCOVERY could be a place to start?

On 10 December 2013 21:12, Jorge <xxopxe@gmail.com> wrote:

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

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