Multilingual Blinkenlights!

25 Sep 2013embeddedhaskell

⊕Lights, mid-blink

I got hold of a BeagleBone Black a few weeks ago (courtesy of Tom Nielsen, who’d had it for a while, but had no time to play with it). This is a small (credit card sized) Linux machine with an ARM processor, intended for, well, pretty much anything you can use a little computer for. It has 512 Mb of RAM, plus 2 Gb of flash storage, so it’s not a completely trivial machine.

Obviously, to do anything really significant with it requires some hardware work (there are lots of general purpose I/O pins to play with, plus UARTs, Ethernet, USB, SPI, a couple of analogue-to-digital converters, PWM drivers for motor control, and even HDMI video output!), but there are a few LEDs on the board itself that lend themselves to a blinkenlights demo...

The BeagleBone comes with some built-in software to let people write code quickly, using JavaScript of all things. There’s also a bit of documentation about programming the thing in C. But (of course) I wanted Haskell blinkenlights!

So, the goal was to write a little bit of code to count in binary on the four user-addressable LEDs on the board, first in Javascript, then in C, then (somehow) in Haskell.

Counting in Javascript

This was easy. You plug the BeagleBone into a USB port on your PC, then you can SSH to it and you have a relatively full Linux distribution to play with, which includes Node.js, so you can run Javascript directly from the command line. There’s a little Javascript library called “Bonescript” that includes utilities for setting up the hardware and doing I/O, and all it takes to flip the LEDs is this:

var b = require('bonescript');

var i = 0;

b.pinMode("USR0", b.OUTPUT);
b.pinMode("USR1", b.OUTPUT);
b.pinMode("USR2", b.OUTPUT);
b.pinMode("USR3", b.OUTPUT);
setInterval(step, 1000);

function step() {
  var p0 = i & 1 ? b.HIGH : b.LOW;
  var p1 = i & 2 ? b.HIGH : b.LOW;
  var p2 = i & 4 ? b.HIGH : b.LOW;
  var p3 = i & 8 ? b.HIGH : b.LOW;
  i = (i + 1) % 16;
  b.digitalWrite("USR0", p0);
  b.digitalWrite("USR1", p1);
  b.digitalWrite("USR2", p2);
  b.digitalWrite("USR3", p3);
}

We set up the four I/O pins that control the LEDs to act as outputs using the pinMode function, then once a second we set the states of those pins using the digitalWrite function.

Easy peasy. But it’s Javascript. Not a fan.

Counting in C

A bit of investigation in the bonescript.js library reveals that all of the magic of controlling the BeagleBone’s hardware is done through some cunning Linux device-driver-to-filesystem jiggery-pokery. All of the hardware is accessed by reading and writing files under the /sys filesystem. For example, writing the string "1" to the file /sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr0/brightness switches LED0 on.

This means that the C code is no more complicated than the Javascript, although it’s a little more verbose because the stuff that’s hidden away in the Bonescript library in Javascript is in plain sight here:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <unistd.h>

void cleanup(int);
void step(int);
void setupLED(int led);
void digitalWrite(int led, int state);

int i = 0;

int main(void)
{
  setupLED(0); setupLED(1); setupLED(2); setupLED(3);
  signal(SIGINT, cleanup);
  signal(SIGTERM, cleanup);
  signal(SIGALRM, step);
  alarm(1);
  while (1) sleep(10);
}

void cleanup(int n) { exit(0); }

void step(int n)
{
  digitalWrite(0, (i & 1) ? 1 : 0);
  digitalWrite(1, (i & 2) ? 1 : 0);
  digitalWrite(2, (i & 4) ? 1 : 0);
  digitalWrite(3, (i & 8) ? 1 : 0);
  i = (i + 1) % 16;
  alarm(1);
}

const char *triggers[] = {
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr0/trigger",
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr1/trigger",
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr2/trigger",
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr3/trigger"
};

void setupLED(int led)
{
  FILE *fp = fopen(triggers[led], "w");
  fprintf(fp, "gpio\n");
  fclose(fp);
}

const char *brightness[] = {
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr0/brightness",
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr1/brightness",
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr2/brightness",
  "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr3/brightness"
};

void digitalWrite(int led, int value)
{
  value = value ? 1 : 0;
  FILE *fp = fopen(brightness[led], "w");
  fprintf(fp, "%d\n", value);
  fclose(fp);
}

The flow of control is just the same as the Javascript code, except that we use SIGALRM to manage the 1-second delay between state changes.

Being Linux, the OS on the BeagleBone comes with a C compiler (GCC 4.7.3 on the version I have), so it’s easy to compile and run this.

Again, easy peasy.

Counting in Haskell!

Now though, what about Haskell? The BeagleBone, although it’s pretty beefy for an “embedded” platform, is probably a little too puny to host a full GHC installation. (For GHC 7.6.3, on my 64-bit Linux machine, the GHC executable is about 33 Mb, and /usr/lib/ghc-7.6.3 is about 812 Mb...)

So we need some sort of “diet” Haskell. It turns out that there is a project called Ajhc that goes under the byline “Haskell Everywhere”. The people involved in this have managed to compile and run Haskell code for platforms much more restricted than the BeagleBone, so I had great hopes for this.

First question: how to compile things? I installed Ajhc on my PC and had no trouble compiling some simple test programs. But Ajhc is written in Haskell, and is generally built with GHC, so I wasn’t going to be able to host it on the BeagleBone. Ajhc is set up to make cross-compiling easy, but I decided to take a much more pragmatic approach. Ajhc emits C code which it then compiles using GCC, so all I needed to do was to capture that intermediate C code, bundle it up and copy it to the BeagleBone, where I could compile it to an executable.

It turns out that a suitable incantation to Ajhc is something like

ajhc -dc -fffi --tdir=./tmp BlinkLED.hs

This tells Ajhc to dump its intermediate C code, to enable the Haskell foreign function interface, and to use directory ./tmp for its temporary files. This last thing is important because Ajhc builds its own run-time system (RTS) on an as-needed basis, and you need to capture the C files needed for this as well as the main program C file. To make life easy, Ajhc writes the GCC command needed to compile all of the C files together into an executable into the first line of its intermediate C file, so I wrote a little script to run Ajhc, pick out this GCC command, and tar up all the files needed to build things from the intermediate C code. I could then copy this to the BeagleBone and just run the GCC compile command to get an executable.

Sounds simple, eh? There remained only one trap for the unwary. Using GHC all day every day, you kind of get used to the idea that what is implemented by GHC is Haskell. But that’s not completely true, and there are some differences between Ajhc and GHC. I didn’t trip over any language differences so far, but one library difference that comes up immediately if you want to do anything hardwarey is that the threadDelay function in GHC’s Control.Concurrent is not part of the Haskell standard. No problem, since we can roll our own delay function by using a FFI call to usleep!

Anyway, here’s the Haskell code:

module Main where

import Control.Monad (forM_)
import Data.Bits (testBit)
import System.IO
import Foreign.C.Types

led :: String -> Int -> String
led c i = "/sys/class/leds/beaglebone:green:usr" ++ show i ++ "/" ++ c

ledWrite :: String -> String -> Int -> IO ()
ledWrite c s i = withFile (led c i) WriteMode $ \h -> do
    hSetBuffering h NoBuffering
    hPutStrLn h s

setupLED :: Int -> IO ()
setupLED = ledWrite "trigger" "gpio"

digitalWrite :: Int -> Bool -> IO ()
digitalWrite i v = ledWrite "brightness" (if v then "1" else "0") i

usleep :: Int -> IO ()
usleep us = usleep' (fromIntegral us) >> return ()

foreign import ccall "unistd.h usleep"
  usleep' :: CUInt -> IO CInt

main :: IO ()
main = do
  forM_ [0..3] setupLED
  forM_ (cycle [0..15::Int]) $ \i -> do
    forM_ [0..3] $ \b -> digitalWrite b (testBit i b)
    usleep 1000000

It’s pretty simple. And it’s Haskell on an “embedded” device, for rather large values of “embedded”.

What’s next? I’m going to try to get the Scotty web server working on the BeagleBone, then I’m going to try to get the thing talking to the cheap USB webcam I have. As a first hardware project (involving a minimal amount of hardware!), I’d like to make a little wildlife cam I can stick out in the woods to take pictures of deer and whatnot as they frolic through the trees. I’ll either use OpenCV to do motion detection between frames captured by the camera or (a tiny bit more ambitious), I’ll use an infrared sensor to wake the board up and start taking pictures when something comes close. I have lots of other ideas, but something like this should be a good start.