Support for other processors?

[RoyLB]

Hello,

I am interested in using Scilab to generate embedded control systems that execute on microprocessors. I note your product, which only seems to run on the dsPIC platform . I was just wondering if you had any plans to support other processors, such as AVR or ARM, or others.

Thanks
Roy

[paolo.gai]

Hi Roy,

There is nothing which prevent to write the support for other microcontrollers. In fact, in the past we thought of writing the support for other microcontrollers, but in order to do that we need somehow a board that either has a reasonable amount of users... or either has someone funding for making the work.

At the moment we concentrated in writing the code for the FLEX board. We are also really open to accept contributions for the support of other architectures, provided that the contributions come with the same license of the system (GPL + Linking Exception)

Soon we\'ll also release EE 1.5.0, which will put together the support for ARM7, AVR, and dsPIC.

Which architecture/board are you mainly looking at?

Ciao,

PJ

[RoyLB]

AVR or ARM would be good.

Why did you choose dsPIC for your processor?

Are you saying that the Scicos -> Flex code generation is open source? Anyone could modify the code to support another chip?

Thanks
Roy

[paolo.gai]

Because of many reasons, like the availability of support, the previous knowledge of the team with microchip chips, the fact that is faster than avr, the DSP instructions...

About the open source... everything we have made is open source... you can get the code, modify it, and (hopefully) contribute it back Next version planned soon will also have support for ARM7...

PJ

[RoyLB]

Thanks

Will you be releasing an ARM7 based FLEX board set?

- Roy

[paolo.gai]

Hi!

We currently have no plans for an ARM7 based FLEX board... but soon we will release an ARM9-based board with linux (and maybe ERIKA too...)

Ciao,

PJ

[RoyLB]

OK. I\'m looking forward to hearing about your ARM products

Thanks
- Roy

[VincentB1]

Dear Paolo,

I am entering this thread because I have a similar question.

I am using Scilab to make simulations. I would like to generate a PC console application able to run natively on PC with MSWindows XP OS. That it to say this application should not require any prior deployment of DLL or other things on the simulation machines (or if there is such a requirement the installation should be very simple and should not require any re-installation when there are updates of Scilab). The reason is that I would use quite a number of PCs to run simulations.

To that purpose, I tought that I could use your code generator with some enhancements. I need to evaluate the amount of work such enhancements would be for me:

1) Is there any port of the Erika OS on PC, where Erika OS would be emulated within an MSWindows application, for instance by using the POSIX threads (which have a port in windows called pthreads-win32) ?

2) Does the generated C code needs cygwin to compile and run, that is to say a full Linux environnement under MSWindows. Or could it compile with MinGW. In other words are there things like \"fork\", \"sockets\" and other things based on *nix processes, or can be it based only on threads.

3) How would the I/O to files be handled. Is there any generated code for the mopen, mget, mclose, functions ?

4) Does the generated C code use some intrinsic libraries which are specific to the FLEX board and without C equivalent ?

Thanks in anticipation for your answers,

Vincent.

[paolo.gai]

Hi!

To that purpose, I tought that I could use your code generator with some enhancements. I need to evaluate the amount of work such enhancements would be for me:

Ok, fine! (Btw, The code generator is from Roberto bucher, SUPSI Lugano...)

1) Is there any port of the Erika OS on PC, where Erika OS would be emulated within an MSWindows application, for instance by using the POSIX threads (which have a port in windows called pthreads-win32) ?

No, we never ported it to i386.On that domain, there is already the support for Linux/RTAI...

2) Does the generated C code needs cygwin to compile and run, that is to say a full Linux environnement under MSWindows. Or could it compile with MinGW. In other words are there things like "fork", "sockets" and other things based on *nix processes, or can be it based only on threads.

Nothing of that in fact, the produced code is just C code, without any Unix primitives. You may end up implementing Unix calls inside the blocks, but this is another story...

3) How would the I/O to files be handled. Is there any generated code for the mopen, mget, mclose, functions ?

You should write a specific block for that...

4) Does the generated C code use some intrinsic libraries which are specific to the FLEX board and without C equivalent ?

Yes... but you can probably skip them. they are for the peripherals. The rest of the code is platform independent...

I suggest you to take a look either at the RTAI port or to our Xenomai port (available under the scilab download secion of our website)... the environment there is very much similar to windows than erika. It should be not so difficult to modify the makefiles to make them compile under cygwin or other decent Windows runtime environment with Unix commands...

PJ

[VincentB1]

Thanks Paolo for your quick answer. I will have a look.

Vincent.