[Hardware-pm] what is the aim ?

[Vikas N Kumar]

Hi

Is Hardware.pm only for Perl projects with hardware ?

For one of my projects, I am working on creating this language VIC
(https://github.com/vikasnkumar/vic) to program Microchip's PIC
microcontrollers.

VIC is basically a high-level DSL which will get compiled to PIC
assembly, so the user doesn't have to code in assembly or C and can use
in-built library functions and write simpler easy to understand code.

The compiler of VIC is written in Perl and is available on CPAN too for
now. Currently it is pretty rudimentary but in the next few months it
should be very much capable of abstracting out various things such as
UART, I2C and SPI access for developers. This will pave the way to also
support a variety of PIC microcontrollers with the same VIC code, as
long as the microcontrollers can support the same features.

It is a serious work in progress, but if you have the PICKit2 and the
Low Pin Count development board (they come as a package) from Microchip,
you can use VIC's existing examples to do all their lessons.

There is a lot more features that I will be adding such as 16, 32 and
64-bit arithmetic for the 8-bit microcontrollers and serial bus
communications as mentioned earlier. This should be available by the end
of April if not earlier.

Thanks
vicash