The Lisp Badge mini computer has turned out to be quite useful and fun for little hardware hacking projects. Its designer, David Johnson-Davies, suggested that the SMART Response XE would make a good off-the-shelf uLisp computer, eliminating the need to build one from scratch.
I ordered a few SMART Response XEs from an auction site to see what was possible. I found Larry Bank‘s excellent Arduino library and fdufnews‘s schematics, which provided a great starting point. With guidance from David, I completed an initial uLisp port:
To load the code, I use an ISP programmer and a special PCB with POGO pins:
On Debian, I run:
make ispload
to load LispBadge.ino without a bootloader.
The SMART Response XE uses the ATmega128RFA1 microcontroller, which has a ZigBee IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver. David and I are discussing adding uLisp functions to make use of this capability.
Exciting stuff — thanks for sharing!
Do you plan to make more details available later so people can reproduce this and/or sell such devices on Tindie?
Clarification: As in YOU selling the devices, not others capitalizing on your work. I’m interested in personal use and otherwise supporting your project.
Interesting idea, I hadn’t considered that.
Everything required is published in the links throughout the post, however putting it all together is challenging.
While writing this, I did find the ones being sold with BASIC pre-installed. As far as I know, you can’t reprogram them without the POGO adapter.
The POGO pins are long and difficult to align. For an easy-to-use solution, there would need to be USB dongle with an ATmega128RFA1, for wireless reprogramming (generic ZigBee dongles don’t support the required communication protocol, apparently). Larry Bank already created a bootloader with wireless support that could be installed one-time via the POGO pins. I have an SRXE that I cracked open that could work in the “wireless programmer” capacity. But it’d be nicer to have a dedicated dongle.