"Shell" or Commandline interpreter for microcontrollers

You might want to ask this question on comp.lang.forth.

Regards, Paul.

This is my idea of an integrated virtual machine, which seems similar to the shell you are talking about, but it is a compiler on the PC side. Once you download your program to the device it runs under the control of the VM, which includes multi-tasking and RTOS functionality. A "fat" debugger on the PC side has total remote control of the embedded VM over the serial port, so you have extensive debugging support.

My open source tools currently work on the 68hcs12 (9s12) family, and I'm looking at Arm7 for the future. But I didn't implement this Embedded VM yet due to lack of time.

Eric

:) We currenty use forth and want to move away from it. My experience has been that barely anyone knows about forth and a lot of my questions, end up on discussions of forth at best or flame wars at worst!

Thanks Nihar

Hi,

Looks very promising. But I wonder how much realtime response would you have to sacrifice?

Regards Nihar

It's fairly easy to write a command line interpreter. However, what commands should it recognise? You haven't said what you want it to actually do ;).

Steve

Well yes. It should not be very difficult to write a simple commandline interpreter. I was thinking of now re-inventing the wheel.

We currently use Forth in our systems and manufactuing/support use it for

1. View/Manipulate memory location/registers/EEPROM
2. Write simple loops/functions to automate setup parameters.

Thanks Nihar

Well yes. It should not be very difficult to write a simple commandline interpreter. I was thinking of not re-inventing the wheel.

We currently use Forth in our systems and manufactuing/support use it for

1. View/Manipulate memory location/registers/EEPROM
2. Write simple loops/functions to automate setup parameters.

Thanks Nihar

Elsewhere you've said you'd like to move away from Forth, so I'll refrain from suggesting that ;).

Re not re-inventing the wheel - I sympathise, but I'm certainly not aware of any "standard" CLI. I've written such things many times in the past, for similar reasons to yourself - I also wrote a PC-hosted scripting system to talk to the CLI to provide both ATE and regression testing. Works well. (But is sadly proprietary, i.e. I wrote it for a client with specific needs and cannot share it.)

Steve

Have you considered Lua?

I run Lua under embedded Linux on an ARM processor, and it is very capable. My understanding is that Lua is used in embedded systems such as routers to provide an ad hoc tuning/configuration port.

Lua is also very popular with game programmers as a scripting language that sits on top of lower level C/C++ functions. I am not personally interested in game programming, but I think that speaks to Lua's fit in some quasi-embedded applications where Python is too large.

Lua is written in C for maximum portability. But note that to get the most out of it, your RTOS must support shared libraries. This requirement kept me from getting Lua to do everything I wanted under the new Minix 3. However, statically linked Lua still has a lot to offer (and worked well under Minix 3).

Since Lua also works under desktop Linux, Windows, etc., you could easily develop Lua scripts for your embedded system in a convenient Linux or Windows environment, perhaps simulating your embedded application, and then migrate the scripts to the actual embedded target.

Lua is small and fast and should be a good fit for many embedded applications that would benefit from a scripting language.

Thanks.

Jim

Now, that is interesting. Anybody had any experience with this?