What sort of targets are people looking at, what sort of debugging is available, and has anybody experimented with the "AVR Dragon"?

On 04 Jun 2017 8:29 PM, "Mark Morgan Lloyd" <

wrote: What sort of targets are people looking at, what sort of debugging is

available, and has anybody experimented with the "AVR Dragon"?

As a hobbyist I've built some simple projects with arduino and then standalone mega and tiny range controllers using avr-gcc. Don't have hardware debugger.

I have recently started avr programming on fpc-pascal. The trunk compiler is already quite good. One problem is obviously lack of libraries to interface with peripherals such as LCD, serial, SD cards etc.

mikroPascal (not free) supports AVR and many other chips.

https://shop.mikroe.com/compilers/mikropascal/avr-electronic-license

Brian

Brian wrote

mikroPascal (not free) supports AVR and many other chips. https://shop.mikroe.com/compilers/mikropascal/avr-electronic-license Brian

Yes, but I was asking about the FPC situation. I'm desperately resisting local pressure to write code that might end up non-trivial in C/C++.

As far as I know there is not ab FPC solution by now.

I have Mikropascal for AVR and it works good.
All the projects I do with with it.

They also have an ARM Pascal compiler which works fine.

4k Byte code for AVR and 8k Byte code for ARM is free. You can download it for free. I have a USB dongle Version here.

Rainer Stratmann wrote

Am Donnerstag, 15. Juni 2017, 08:34:49 schrieb Mark Morgan Lloyd:> On 14/06/17 20:15, Brian wrote:> > mikroPascal (not free) supports AVR and many other chips.> > https://shop.mikroe.com/compilers/mikropascal/avr-electronic-license> > Brian> > Yes, but I was asking about the FPC situation. I'm desperately resisting> local pressure to write code that might end up non-trivial in C/C++. As far as I know there is not ab FPC solution by now.

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/AVR

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/AVR_Programming

Hi,

Well, FPC is an open source project, which means without community feedback and contribution, it won't improve, or would, but much slower. :)

So if you have time, how about you try if it works for your usecase/platform/etc, and at least give feedback on it? Even if it didn't work, if you run into issues you're unable to solve, and share them, it might be helpful for the developers. And I'm sure some of the issues you'd encounter could be fixed overnight, if the devs would know it's a blocker for someone's actual usecase.

Especially with a project as young and specialized as FPC's AVR backend.

Charlie

At the risk of making myself unpopular: because right now I /don't/ have time. And part of the reason that my colleagues and I are seriously short of time is that we've put far too much of it over the years into trying to work around problems in various open source projects on various architectures, starting off with Debian on SPARC and heading off in even more arcane directions.

And that /does/ include FPC.

Especially with a project as young and specialized as FPC's AVR backend.

"Young and specialised"... exactly. Which is why I was interested in any light that people currently working on AVR could throw on it, since what's in the Wiki is roughly 9 months old (apart from recently-added links etc.) and that's a long time for something which people are actively working on.

I risk the same: mail less, code more :>

Hi,

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

At the risk of making myself unpopular: because right now I /don't/ have time.

Sorry, I didn't mean this personal to you. I was just a bit triggered on the fact that people offer competing products on FPC status requests, because I've seen it more than once that people just ask for the Status of X, regarding FPC, and when it's not there right now, they just move on to something else. And we have to "compete" with a whole range of commercial products, where this attitude doesn't help.

You are right, of course.

Charlie

Karoly Balogh wrote

Hi, On Thu, 15 Jun 2017, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: > At the risk of making myself unpopular: because right now I /don't/ have> time. Sorry, I didn't mean this personal to you. I was just a bit triggered onthe fact that people offer competing products on FPC status requests,because I've seen it more than once that people just ask for the Status ofX, regarding FPC, and when it's not there right now, they just move on tosomething else. And we have to "compete" with a whole range of commercialproducts, where this attitude doesn't help.

I agree for what it's worth, and I also find it very frustrating when- in a mailing list specifically for FPC or Lazarus- somebody asks a question about the standard development environment or a standard component and gets the answer that the best way to do it is to use somebody else's pet project.

>> Especially with a project as young and specialized as FPC's AVR backend.>> "Young and specialised"... exactly. Which is why I was interested in any> light that people currently working on AVR could throw on it, since> what's in the Wiki is roughly 9 months old (apart from recently-added> links etc.) and that's a long time for something which people are> actively working on. You are right, of course.

I'm only using Arduinos at the moment (potentially including e.g. Teensy), and until I'm far more knowledgeable about remote debugging etc. am inclined to keep it that way :-)

Thanks for that, encouraging.