(Announce) "OCAPIC" : OCaml for PIC18 microcontrollers

[Philippe Wang <philippe.wang@lip6.fr>]

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Dear all,

this is an announcement for "OCAPIC", a project which brings OCaml to programming PIC micro-controllers.

Some PIC18 series characteristics:
- 8 bit architecture
- low cost (a few US dollars), fairly spread in electronics world
- very low volatile memory (a few bytes only, up to ~5000 bytes, depending on the model)
- very low non-volatile memory (less than a KB up to 128 KB)
- EEPROM : 0 to 1024 bytes

How to program those little chips with OCaml:
- write an OCaml program, compile it, transfer it to the PIC.

Well, actually it demands a little more than just that:
- write an OCaml program, like usually, while keeping in mind that the stack is more limited than usual, same for the heap
- compile it (with ocamlc)
- reduce the binary (with ocamlclean : a bytecode reducer which removes dead-code)
- transform the (reduced or not) binary (with bc2asm : take back not useful zeros, thence reducing the binary size)
- transfer it to the PIC along with its OCaml VM.

Indeed, an OCaml VM has been implemented in PIC18 ASM in order to run OCaml programs on a PIC ! :-)

An example of real program is in the distribution (open source, downloadable from the website):
ocapic-1.3/src/tests/goblet/ (722 lines of ML code).

We also provide a simulator in order to run on a PC (needs X11 (Linux/MacOSX) and GCC) your programs written for PIC18.

The whole implementation has been fairly well tested, however the documentation is still quite young.

Here is the website : 
http://www.algo-prog.info/ocaml_for_pic/ 

Cheers.

Benoît Vaugon (developer and initiator of OCAPIC project)
Philippe Wang (supervisor)
Emmanuel Chailloux (supervisor)

P.S. si vous êtes francophone et nous contactez directement, merci de le faire en français


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