Developing for the Propeller using the Arduino core

jasiek

Hey,

I've played with the IDEs supplied by Parallax and came to the conclusion that there might be value in permitting users to take advantage of a multitude of libraries for the Arduino,
assuming the core would be ported to run on the Propeller.

Has anyone looked into this?

-J

Heater.

Welcome to the forum jasiek.

Indeed this idea has been discussed here over the years. In fact I have an Arduino form factor board with a Propeller instead of a AVR on it. The PropASC board. There has been work on getting some Arduino API's working on that board. Not being an Arduino guy I did not follow how far that got.

DavidZemon

There is a project that appears to be abandoned at this point called lib-propelleruino
https://code.google.com/archive/p/lib-propelleruino/

I have not tried it myself, but the goal was to port the Arduino libraries to the Propeller. Combined with the Propeller ASC (or Propeller ASC+) it might make for a nice environment.

I have converted a few Arduino programs to use my own PropWare HAL and it has been pretty easy for the most part. Look at Printer for a serial API and use pwOut as a global instance, comparable to Arduino's "Serial".

There are a couple philosophical differences.

1) I think programmers are capable of writing their own main function, so I do not provide one via PropWare.
2) Because of the Propeller's native waitcnt instruction/function, I do not provide a delay function. I think users are better off learning how to use waitcnt.

So Arduino code like this...

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  Serial.println("Hello world!");
  delay(1000);
}

Could be turned into code that compiles with PropWare like so

void setup()
{
  // No serial setup needed - defaults will do just fine
}

void loop()
{
  // `pwOut` is a global instance of the PropWare::Printer class. It will be  
  // optimized out by GCC if unused in your code
  pwOut.println("Hello world!");
  waitcnt(1000 * MILLISECOND + CNT);
}

int main () {
  setup();
  while (1) {
    loop();
  }
}

Martin Hodge

Heater. wrote: »

...The PropASC board. Long since unavailable.

Not only are they still available, they are plentiful. And considering the power of the Propeller, they are a great value for the money.

http://mghdesigns.com/propeller/mgh-designs/propeller-asc-arduino-shield-compatible-1.html

Parallax has a few too.

https://www.parallax.com/product/32214

Heater.

Oops, sorry Martin.

Actually I don't have my PropASC board. I loaned it to a friend who had never heard of a Propeller but uses Arduino. He liked it so much I never got in back!

The PropASC is a great little Propeller board even if you don't need any Arduino compatibility.

I should order some more...

jasiek

Thanks guys, I'll have a look at the library on google code.

From my perspective, I think the value would be within reusing existing code libraries (they're pretty much click-to-install kind of thing), rather than having pin compatibility with boards.

Martin_H

To bad I missed this discussion when it was happening. I got an email from Google stating that they are making their repos read only so I moved the repo to Git hub:

https://github.com/Martin-H1/libArduino

I wouldn't say this project is abandoned. It's more that it does what I want so I am not adding new features. If anyone wants to extend it I am always willing to incorporate them.