[squeak-dev] would it be fun to implement Squeak (and SPOON!) on this hardware?

Jon Hylands jon at huv.com
Mon Dec 2 15:01:27 UTC 2013


I don't see any reason why something like Little Smalltalk couldn't be
ported to run on a 32 bit ARM7 type chip. The one running Micro Fortran has
192 KB of RAM, and a megabyte of FLASH. Of course, the real stumbling block
is people seem to want to be able to run an IDE on the chip, which I think
is silly. Having a command line interpreter like python has, and the
ability to push source (maybe using Git or Monticello or whatever) from
your development machine to this chip over wifi/ethernet would make it
really useful for robotics. It would especially be useful if you could run
the command line version of this Smalltalk on a desktop, as the guy does
with Micro Python. I would love to have an instant-on Smalltalk system,
which is one of the reasons I am supporting Micro Python.

I'm currently working on Roz, my quad walker robot, and I've got a
Beaglebone Black running Ubuntu 13.04 onboard, but it feels like overkill,
and dealing with Linux is painful, not to mention having to keep power to
the board all the time once its booted up. If I had something like
Smalltalk-on-a-chip, I would definitely be using it for Roz.

- Jon



On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 3:33 AM, Doug Jones <djsdl at frombob.to> wrote:

> On 11/30/2013 11:18 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
>
>> Karl Ramberg wrote:
>>
>>> PIC Smalltalk does much of this. But it translates everything to
>>> assembler.
>>> http://www.huv.com/uSeeker/smalltalk/pic.html
>>>
>>
>> This is a cross developement system (where you create the program on a
>> "host computer", like your PC, and then upload it to a "target
>> computer", like a microcontroller board, in order to run it). The
>> interesting aspect of the micro Python is that it is a native
>> environment. The PC just acts as a dumb ASCII terminal.
>>
>> You can also have a mix where the application is developed on the target
>> machine while most of the development environment runs on the host. That
>> was the case for Palm Smalltalk and OOVM which used Squeak and Eclipse
>> respectively on the PC side.
>>
>> -- Jecel
>>
>>
>>
>
> What drew my attention to this project is its high level of openness. Open
> source hardware, and open source software.  And it's reasonably inexpensive.
>
> It's true that it's not well suited to uses that require a sophisticated
> GUI or lots of RAM, but there are lots of other kinds of uses.  Think of
> the Arduino and its many derivatives:  It's being used for a huge variety
> of things, and that's largely because it's inexpensive and the software and
> hardware are open.  Anybody can download a hardware design, tweak it a bit
> if needed, and send it off to a PC board house to be manufactured in any
> quantity (or just make it themselves in the garage).  Or just buy hardware
> off the shelf if that's all you need.
>
> But to program the Arduino, you're basically writing in C.  With this
> Micro Python board, you program it in a high-level language.
>
> The hardware portion of the project, of course, is language-agnostic.
> Anybody can take the same hardware and implement any language that the
> hardware can support.  And this is where it gets really interesting.
>
> If you read the entire Kickstarter proposal, including the FAQs and the
> Updates, he provides a very detailed description of the software he has
> written.  When I read that, I see a comprehensive reference implementation
> that would be invaluable to anyone wanting to port another language onto
> this platform.  (And he put it all under the same MIT license that Squeak
> uses!)
>
> The hardware has lots of GPIO pins, and USB, so it can talk to other
> hardware.  He is now adding wifi, and shortly he should hit his second
> stretch goal for adding Ethernet.  He will have Python libraries for
> interfacing with all this hardware.  And the board has an SD card slot, so
> gigabytes of storage are available (virtual memory?).
>
> Moore's Law, which still somehow seems to be in effect, guarantees that
> the price difference between the Arduino platform and next-generation
> hardware platforms like this new one will gradually drop to near zero. (I
> think the high-volume cost of the processor chips now differ by no more
> than a dollar or two.)  So we should expect Arduino-like projects to
> gradually shift to higher-level languages.  I think it would be awesome if
> Squeak was one of the languages readily available on these kinds of
> platforms.
>
>
>
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