It does have its place of course, but this probably ain’t it. I am all about C, unix, and operating systems, so I am reading this with eager interest, but like some others I don’t see how Python found its way into this discussion. Posted in Microcontrollers Tagged arduino, mega, microcontroller, pdp-11, SAMD21, SAMD51, Teensy, unix Post navigation This isn’t the first time that someone has felt the need to port Unix to something small we featured a build before which uses the same PDP-11 implementation on a 32-bit STM32 microcontroller. reports that performance on some of the less-capable microcontrollers is not great, but that it does run perfectly on the Teensy and the SAMD51.
Right now it is able to boot and run Unix but is currently missing support for some interfaces and other hardware. ’s emulator runs on the SAMD51, SAMD21, Teensy 4.1, and any Arduino Mega and is also easily portable to any other microcontrollers. The PDP-11 was a popular minicomputer platform from the ’70s until the early 90s, which influenced a lot of computer and operating system designs in its time. This is an implementation of the PDP-11 minicomputer running a Unix-based operating system as an emulator. For that decided to port Unix to several popular microcontrollers. While Python is arguably more straightforward, sometimes the best choice is to work within a full-fledged operating system, even if it’s on a microcontroller. For a lot of us, the preference is for something a little higher level than C.
C and C++ are powerful tools, but not everyone has the patience (or enough semicolons) to use them all the time.