5 ms·

Tiny Lisp Computer

153 points by jabits 10y ago

analog31 10y ago
Nice work. Now you can make a programmable pocket calculator, that's programmed in Lisp!
gcb0 10y ago
it's basically a uLisp shell on Arduino? it will be shuned by the Haskell elite unless you need a monad to toggle the led, since it's intrinsically a non functional side effect :)
- na85 10y ago
  >it will be shuned by the Haskell elite Seems like a feature, not a bug :^)
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Lisp made its choice long ago: flexability over constraint, freedom over guarantees, call it what you will. It does make it a hard language to optimize though. Thankfully, it got significantly easier once functions became opaque. But it's still a PITA.
Lerc 10y ago
uLisp is cool (code is a bit scary in places though), I'm working on a virtual game console which uses an AVR. I added some simple drawing functions. http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/lisptri.gif http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/lisptri.gif The emulator is at http://fingswotidun.com/avr/ http://fingswotidun.com/avr/ but it's very alpha. If you have a small screen you can't even click on the run button because of an old debugging div is sitting on top of it.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  I would like to read a blog post about your virtual game console if you have or ever write one.
  - Lerc 10y ago
    I have one from the very early days. http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2015/09/8-bit-machine.html http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2015/09/8-bit-machine.html I've been planning on an update talking about Getting C programs running on it then building avr BASIC and Lisp for run time languages. Probably far more likely to do updates given someone has actually shown interest in reading them. I kind of assumed My blog posts went into a void. It's also on github https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8 https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8
randrews 10y ago
Huh. I thought about doing this, figured it would be impossible / pointless, and that (apparently wrong) assumption led me on a year-long journey: The core problem, I thought, would be that AVRs have very very little memory. 316 Lisp cells sounds about right. I figured, well that's pointless. How can I do better? I wasn't able to find a microcontroller that you can attach external memory to (without cheating and using something like an SPI RAM chip, although that's super easy). So I ended up figuring out how to build a real computer instead, around a Z80, with 64k total address space. The one I'm working on now has 32k RAM (still not great for Lisp) but you can divide up the address space between RAM and ROM however you want, so I'm planning for the next version to have the whole thing be RAM and use an AVR to "boot" it by loading code into RAM from an SD card.
- mikepavone 10y ago
  Some of the devices in the Mega AVR line support external memory. The ATmega640 is an example. Generally you'll only find it on higher pin-count devices which aren't available in DIP packages. If you need something that's a bit easier to work with, the Teensy 2.0++ is an option. As for your Z80 computer, another option would be to add some simple bank-switching hardware to allow you to boot from ROM. Probably more work and less flexible than just using an AVR for boot though.
  - sitkack 10y ago
    Once one starts getting into the high pin-count devices, just make the leap to ARM and using something like [0] which has 1MB of Data RAM. [0] http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=0virtualkey0virtualkeySTM32F765VGT6 http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=0virtualke...
  - randrews 10y ago
    I'm fine working with surface-mount stuff, I can solder it by hand, it's not actually as hard as it looks. Bank switching seems like a pain to manage though. I wish I had learned this stuff in school. I majored in CS, and we didn't go any lower level than C++.
- 10y ago
Annatar 10y ago
In my opinion, this is among the coolest / revolutionary computer products that I have seen in the last 30 years of my usage of computers. It is also great to see that LISP is gaining more and more popularity as people realize the advantages of the stateless, reentrant, idempotent functional programming paradigm.
- ballooney 10y ago
  I don't mean to sound snarky in the least, genuinely curious, but haven't a large proportion of tinkerers, especially with an EE bent, tried to put a simple lisp interpreter on some limited hardware at some point in their lives? I certainly know that a bunch of people learning FPGA programming in a user group i once belonged to all tried to put a lisp machine on one after working through the last chapter of SICP, and there's that lovely article about lisp interpreters running on old JPL probes back in the day. What about this makes it revolutionary?
  - rjsw 10y ago
    The JPL probe ran a fully compiled Common Lisp.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Of course it's not revolutionary. Lisp is the past technology of the future. And indeed lots of people have done things like this, with Lisp or Forth or Basic or microPython or Lua. I believe a very early Raspberry Pi prototype was an Atmel chip that ran a Lua interpreter with bit-banged VGA display. It was extremely cheap but ultimately deemed not capable enough.
eriknstr 10y ago
The article links to http://www.technoblogy.com/list?1GLV http://www.technoblogy.com/list?1GLV calling it the full code listing for this Tiny Lisp Computer, however, that link leads to code for a ATtiny841 "I2C Display Module" which is from the "Make your own I2C peripherals" blog post at http://www.technoblogy.com/show?1G29 http://www.technoblogy.com/show?1G29. Hope the author sees this so he can change the link to be the correct one.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  I notified the author about it on the uLisp forums. He has now updated the link.
mudefse 10y ago
Hey, buzzard, are you cloth-eared? Come on, look at hotchas here http://u.to/ZOg3Dw http://u.to/ZOg3Dw
msl 10y ago
Another option for running a lisp (like language) on a small package is esp-lisp [1] running on ESP8622. The ESP8622 has a 32 bit processor running quite fast, and comes with 64K of RAM, so it's clearly not as challenging a platform to run lisp on as the Atmega used here. Its just a software project, though, and leaves the hardware part for others to design. [1] https://github.com/yesco/esp-lisp https://github.com/yesco/esp-lisp

153 points by jabits 10y ago

Nice work. Now you can make a programmable pocket calculator, that's programmed in Lisp!

gcb0 10y ago

it's basically a uLisp shell on Arduino? it will be shuned by the Haskell elite unless you need a monad to toggle the led, since it's intrinsically a non functional side effect :)

na85 10y ago
>it will be shuned by the Haskell elite Seems like a feature, not a bug :^)
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Lisp made its choice long ago: flexability over constraint, freedom over guarantees, call it what you will. It does make it a hard language to optimize though. Thankfully, it got significantly easier once functions became opaque. But it's still a PITA.

Lerc 10y ago

uLisp is cool (code is a bit scary in places though), I'm working on a virtual game console which uses an AVR. I added some simple drawing functions. http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/lisptri.gif http://fingswotidun.com/cruft/lisptri.gif The emulator is at http://fingswotidun.com/avr/ http://fingswotidun.com/avr/ but it's very alpha. If you have a small screen you can't even click on the run button because of an old debugging div is sitting on top of it.

eriknstr 10y ago
I would like to read a blog post about your virtual game console if you have or ever write one.
- Lerc 10y ago
  I have one from the very early days. http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2015/09/8-bit-machine.html http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2015/09/8-bit-machine.html I've been planning on an update talking about Getting C programs running on it then building avr BASIC and Lisp for run time languages. Probably far more likely to do updates given someone has actually shown interest in reading them. I kind of assumed My blog posts went into a void. It's also on github https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8 https://github.com/Lerc/kwak-8

randrews 10y ago

Huh. I thought about doing this, figured it would be impossible / pointless, and that (apparently wrong) assumption led me on a year-long journey: The core problem, I thought, would be that AVRs have very very little memory. 316 Lisp cells sounds about right. I figured, well that's pointless. How can I do better? I wasn't able to find a microcontroller that you can attach external memory to (without cheating and using something like an SPI RAM chip, although that's super easy). So I ended up figuring out how to build a real computer instead, around a Z80, with 64k total address space. The one I'm working on now has 32k RAM (still not great for Lisp) but you can divide up the address space between RAM and ROM however you want, so I'm planning for the next version to have the whole thing be RAM and use an AVR to "boot" it by loading code into RAM from an SD card.

mikepavone 10y ago
Some of the devices in the Mega AVR line support external memory. The ATmega640 is an example. Generally you'll only find it on higher pin-count devices which aren't available in DIP packages. If you need something that's a bit easier to work with, the Teensy 2.0++ is an option. As for your Z80 computer, another option would be to add some simple bank-switching hardware to allow you to boot from ROM. Probably more work and less flexible than just using an AVR for boot though.
- sitkack 10y ago
  Once one starts getting into the high pin-count devices, just make the leap to ARM and using something like [0] which has 1MB of Data RAM. [0] http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=0virtualkey0virtualkeySTM32F765VGT6 http://www.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=0virtualke...
- randrews 10y ago
  I'm fine working with surface-mount stuff, I can solder it by hand, it's not actually as hard as it looks. Bank switching seems like a pain to manage though. I wish I had learned this stuff in school. I majored in CS, and we didn't go any lower level than C++.
10y ago

Annatar 10y ago

In my opinion, this is among the coolest / revolutionary computer products that I have seen in the last 30 years of my usage of computers. It is also great to see that LISP is gaining more and more popularity as people realize the advantages of the stateless, reentrant, idempotent functional programming paradigm.

ballooney 10y ago
I don't mean to sound snarky in the least, genuinely curious, but haven't a large proportion of tinkerers, especially with an EE bent, tried to put a simple lisp interpreter on some limited hardware at some point in their lives? I certainly know that a bunch of people learning FPGA programming in a user group i once belonged to all tried to put a lisp machine on one after working through the last chapter of SICP, and there's that lovely article about lisp interpreters running on old JPL probes back in the day. What about this makes it revolutionary?
- rjsw 10y ago
  The JPL probe ran a fully compiled Common Lisp.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Of course it's not revolutionary. Lisp is the past technology of the future. And indeed lots of people have done things like this, with Lisp or Forth or Basic or microPython or Lua. I believe a very early Raspberry Pi prototype was an Atmel chip that ran a Lua interpreter with bit-banged VGA display. It was extremely cheap but ultimately deemed not capable enough.

eriknstr 10y ago

The article links to http://www.technoblogy.com/list?1GLV http://www.technoblogy.com/list?1GLV calling it the full code listing for this Tiny Lisp Computer, however, that link leads to code for a ATtiny841 "I2C Display Module" which is from the "Make your own I2C peripherals" blog post at http://www.technoblogy.com/show?1G29 http://www.technoblogy.com/show?1G29. Hope the author sees this so he can change the link to be the correct one.

eriknstr 10y ago
I notified the author about it on the uLisp forums. He has now updated the link.

mudefse 10y ago

Hey, buzzard, are you cloth-eared? Come on, look at hotchas here http://u.to/ZOg3Dw http://u.to/ZOg3Dw

msl 10y ago

Another option for running a lisp (like language) on a small package is esp-lisp [1] running on ESP8622. The ESP8622 has a 32 bit processor running quite fast, and comes with 64K of RAM, so it's clearly not as challenging a platform to run lisp on as the Atmega used here. Its just a software project, though, and leaves the hardware part for others to design. [1] https://github.com/yesco/esp-lisp https://github.com/yesco/esp-lisp