There are a few other people on the list who could probably give you some
advice about this, hopefully the new subject tag will catch their attention
;^)  In a nutshell, my belief is that if you are facing a commercial deadline,
then this is probably an ambitious goal.  If not, and you have some time to
explore and move the state of the art forward a bit, then there are several
options.

Tim Rowledge has apparently done ports of Squeak to "bare" metal ( from what
I've been able to gather, anyway ), perhaps several times.

Paul Fernhout did work to allow a Squeak 2.2 mini-image ( a stripped-down
version of the full image ) to run as a headless console application.  I've
been looking at this version as I have interests similar to yours.  I would
also reccomend looking at the Camp Smalltalk Wiki page for the Embedded
Smalltalk activity planned for CS4 in Glen Eyrie, Colorado in June:

    http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/CampSmalltalk/Embedded+Smalltalk

By coincidence, John Hylands ( relation? ) plans to use Smalltalk to control
autonomous underwater vehicles.  He's been doing a number of interesting
things ( Squeak, Pocket Smalltalk, PIC Smalltalk, etc ) at:

    http://www.huv.com

I think there are other examples.  I think that the memory constraints that we
both are looking at are a bit tight, but not totally out of reach.  Since I've
been working under the assumption that "embedded" devices are basically going
to have a lot more RAM by the time I need to worry about this, the main
stumbling block that I see is that the VM's ObjectMemory & Interpreter may
need some modification in order to take advantage of sections of memory that
are ROM vs. those that are RAM.  I'm not a VM guru by any means, so others can
comment on that.

Good luck!  Hope that you find Squeak ( and other Smalltalks ) to be useful
for your project!

- les

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Hylands" <dhylands at broadcom.com>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 8:03 AM
Subject: Introduction


> Hi,
>
> I'm a squeak newbie. I've been programming in C/C++ since around 1985 and I
> took a Smalltalk course (using DigiTalk on a Mac Plus) many years ago (long
> enough that I've pretty much completely forgotten everything).
>
> I'm looking to use squeak in robotic applications on embedded micro
> controllers. My current platform has a 25 MHz 68332 with 512K of RAM and
> 512K of flash.
>
> Presumably, to access hardware devices, I'll have to add new primitives to
> the language (I've seen a document somewhere which describes this).
>
> I also read that Squeak has some ability to convert into C. How exactly does
> this work?
>
> I'd also like to get some guidelines on the process of creating a minimal
> image.
>
> I'm also curious about what techniques people use for source code
> management. How do you integrate CVS and Smalltalk? I'm sure it's straight
> forward, but I haven't seen anything yet which addresses this.
>
> Dave Hylands
>
>