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Microcontrollers are wonderfully useful things, but programming them can be a little daunting if you’re used to the simplicity of compiling for regular PCs. Over time though, this has become easier. Communities have strayed away from assembly code and created higher-level languages such as Micropython, to allow these devices to be programmed in a more accessible manner. Unfortunately, Micropython has historically lacked a decent high-level GUI library. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case, with [amirgon] porting LittlevGL to the platform.
Putting a GUI into a project with a screen seems simple, until one actually gets down to brass tacks. A simple button can consist of a background color, text, and a symbol – and that’s not even considering the use of shading or other visual effects. Having a library to handle the grunt work can massively cut down development time.
[...] There are other approaches to this problem, too – with MyOpenLab being a particularly versatile example.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday March 05 2019, @07:43AM (1 child)
Ad Hominem? Not really your usual style, TMB. However, the point stands. You should match the language to the task at hand, not suggest that everything should be written in C/C++ because that is the only 'true' language. There are millions of microcontrollers out there and I'll bet that the vast majority are not written using C, regardless of your own experience. I've written programs that controlled radars and processed the data for display, or that received, analysed and automatically countered electronic emissions; they were not toy programs. They were all real-time and had to work as advertised. C/C++ was not used in any of them.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 05 2019, @11:41AM
That's not an ad-hom. It's not even an insult. I have written quite a lot of code for myself over the years and I consider every bit of it that wasn't for a job or isn't going to a serious OSS project to be of the "toy" variety. MrPlow is absolutely a toy, for instance. So is most everything in the ~/bin/ directory of my desktop.
Yeah, folks can mandate a language for their own hardware or the boss can mandate one for a project. I'm saying that if you're doing the choosing, you need to choose the language that's going to give you the best results. For a microcontroller that's generally going to be C/C++ or another very tight, compiled language. Maybe a few years down the line Rust will be a viable choice, especially if your team isn't great at memory management. It's never going to be anything that packages a runtime environment in every executable though. Not even a tiny one.
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