Microcontrollers Programming Framework based on a V-like Programming Language

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a programming framework for microcontrollers specially the ones with low program and data memory, using as a base a programming language with modern features. The proposed programming framework is named Aixt Project and took inspiration from other similar projects such as Arduino, Micropython and TinyGo among others. The project’s name is inspired on the weasel pet of the V programming language and at the same time it is a tribute to Ticuna people who live in the Amazon rain-forest, just between Colombia, Peru´ and Brasil. Aixt comes from Aixt¨u or Ait¨u r¨u which means otter in Ticuna language. The proposed programming framework has three main components: the Aixt language based on the V syntax, a transpiler that turns the defined V-like source code into C, and a generic cross-platform Application Programming Interface (API). The target of this project is obtaining a cross-platform programming framework over the same language modern language an the same API, for programming different microcontrollers especially the ones with low memory resources. Aixt language is based on the syntax of V programming language but it uses mutable variables by default. V language was selected to be used as base of this project due to it is a new compiled programming language with interesting modern features. In order to turn the Aixt source code into C, a transpiler is implemented using Python and the some specialized libraries to design each part of its translation process. The transpiled code is compiled by the native C compiler of each microcontroller to obtain the final binary file, that is why the API has to be adapted for each native C compiler. The complete project is released as a free and open source project. Finally, different application test were done over the XC8 and XC16 compilers for the PIC16, PIC18, PIC24 and dsPIC33 microcontrollers families, demonstrating the correct working of the overall framework. Those tests show that the use modern language framework to program any microcontrollers is perfectly feasible using the proposed programming framework.