Thoughts about a tiny portable Operating System?
Christof Eb.
Posts: 1,161
Hi,
for a while now I have been thinking, that the "world of maker boards" is split in
A) with Linux and not suitable for projects with close hardware interaction and really hungry for RAM and
B.) without (standard) operating system.
In B.) there exist some things like Arduino, which offers a hardware abstraction layer or some multi threading solutions like Teensy-Threads or FreeRTOS for ESP32. Micropython also offers some portability but is too slow for many control projects.
So the question is, could there be something useful, which makes functionalities portable between different controllers but is very much simpler than Linux? The effort for documentation seems equally interesting like the effort for the implementation of the functionality itself.
Comments
Compiler supplied common library pretty much serves the purpose.
Micropython too slow? I'm not 100% sure this is true with P2... But, maybe depends what you are doing?
For fast stuff one can spin2cpp full speed code and merge it in. VGA driver for example. But, that is a bit of a hack.
Still, the smartpins help a lot here and can do things like servo control and DAC/ADC without much work.
We've got text editor, pye, and can write and then execute python scrips.
Think it can be a standalone system. OS? maybe? Have to look up definition...
Also there are about 5 free cogs left to do anything high speed…
Micropython is a good option for what you describe, and about to get better.
Version 1.23 will include OpenAMP support for spinning up additional cores, which can be running forth or spin2 or pasm2 or whatever, a bit cleaner and more standard than the CPU method we use now in both streams of MicroPython. MP 1.23 might also feature tinyusb support if we get our act together
I think the Micropython docs are pretty good. They have benefitted from a Google "season of docs" (or two)
Hello!
I believe I might be late to the party, but consider this one: TinyOS. It can be found at tinyos.net/ I believe though that even it is too big for what the author wants.
Mascot away.