What is Neotron?
Neotron is an attempt to make computers simple again, whilst also taking advantage of the very latest in programming language development. We are saddened by chat clients that require multi-Gigabyte installs, and systems with hundreds of millions of lines of source code that no one person could ever hope to understand. We want to build a machine that is sized for an individual to comprehend, not a trillion-dollar corporation.
If you want a pithy sound-bite, it’s like CP/M for tiny ARM microcontrollers, but written in Rust.
Tell me more…
Neotron is based around four fundamental components.
- A standardised OS interface, for portable Applications to call. This provides APIs for reading/writing files, accessing devices, writing to the screen, playing audio, etc.
- A standardised BIOS interface, for the Operating System to call. The BIOS abstracts the specific hardware implementation of the Video, Audio, UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, Disk Drive, Parallel Printer, Keyboard and Mouse interfaces. By using the BIOS, we should be able to run the exact sameNeotron OS on a variety of different microcontrollers.
- Use of the Rust Programming Language to write as much of the software as possible (we avoid raw assembler as much as possible, but we’re happy to port existing applications that are written in C even if we avoid that language in the system software).
- The ARM Thumb-v7M instruction set (as supported by ARM Cortex-M based microcontrollers from the M3 and up). This is what allow us to run the same programs on microcontrollers from different vendors.
Read in full here:
https://neotron-compute.github.io/Neotron-Book/index.html
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