For years, my colleagues and I have been working on lightweight runtimes for parallel languages. To put our work in context, we’ve often targeted small robotics platforms like the LEGO Mindstorms for demonstrating the power of a parallel-safe language for real-time systems. This summer, we realized that the Arduino was a marvelous, open-source platform with an energetic community of developers and users, so we ported our language and tools to the Atmega328.
We have a Mac environment done, are working on Windows, and will have a Linux release by January. This, however, is quite exciting:
Omer (Vimeo, Twitter), a PhD student at the University of Kent and our resident hardware guru, did a modified Arduino design that includes more LEDs (along with a few other nice changes, like a mini-USB connector and a lower-profile power jack that will easily work with LiPoly batteries). The extra LEDs are important, because we wanted a board that made it easy to demonstrate the power of a parallel runtime right from the start without any additional/external components.
I’m especially excited about being able to buy these in bulk and sell them to students at cost for use in classes. Next semester, students in Programming Languages as well as my second-semester first-year seminar titled “Technology and Activism” will build and program their own computers. It will be awesome.
We currently have placeholder material up at concurrency.cc, but soon we’ll have binaries of all of the tools and documentation up that let you start writing parallel programs for your Arduino!
Whoa, congratulations! Those look beautiful. Are there going to be any hacking parties over the summer to sprint on making materials / testing stuff out? If so, I might try to, ah, exercise my new ability to take roadtrips…
Last time I used Occam was in 1987. The most surprising thing was how my single transputer program could be adapted to run on thirty with an effortless bit of reconfiguration. Pity the interprocessor links were too slow. Our application never managed real-time like we hoped.
So 23 years later I have an AVR project and I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be fun to do this in Occam, I wonder if anybody has written a compiler…