Generic info

Using eLua

So, you already built and installed eLua, now it is time to (finally) have some fun with it :) You can compile eLua with either console over UART (the default and by far the most popular) or console over TCP/IP (still experimental, but working quite well). See building eLua for details on how to choose between serial and TCP/IP console.

Using eLua over serial connections

All you need to use eLua over a serial connection is your eLua board connected to a PC running a terminal emulator program.

If you’re using Windows, we recommend TeraTerm. It’s a freeware, it’s very powerful and also easy to use. The native Hyper Terminal progam can do too, as well as any most other terminal emulator programs.

On Linux, you’ll probably be stucked with minicom. It is not exactly intuitive and it runs in text mode, but it’s still very powerful. If you google for "minicom tutorial" you’ll get the hang of it in no time. You can try any other terminal emulator, as long as you set it up properly and it gives you the option of transferring files via XMODEM, which is what eLua uses at the moment. These are the main settings you need to look at:

  • port setup: 115200 baud (38400 for STR7), 8N1(8 data bits, no parity, one stop bit).

  • flow control: none, unless your eLua image is configured to use hardware flow control/

  • newline handling: "CR" on receive, "CR+LF" on send (some terminal programs won’t give you a choice here).

Also, depending on the type of your board, you’ll need some way to connect the board to a serial port on your PC or to USB if you’re using an USB to serial converter. For example (as already explained here), the USB port on the LM3Sxxxx boards is dual, so you can use it as an USB to serial converter after downloading your firmware, thus you don’t need any other type of connection. The same is true for the STR9-comStick board. On the other hand, for the SAM7-EX256 board you’ll need to connect a serial cable to the "RS232" connector, provided that the jumpers are already set as explained here and on the MOD711 you will need to add an RS232 converter chip. There’s no universal rule here, it all depends on your board. Feel free to ask if you need help in our discussion list.

Using eLua over TCP/IP connections

Things are even easier if you decide to enable console over TCP/IP:

  • make sure you know the address of your board. If you enabled static IPs (building) remember what you chose for the static IP; if DHCP (the default) is used instead, your DHCP server should’ve added the address of the eLua board to your DNS. The board name is always "elua" in our code examples too, so if you execute "ping elua" from a shell you should see that the board is alive.

  • telnet to the address of the board (or simply "telnet elua" if your DNS is properly set), and you’ll be greeted with the shell prompt (if the shell is enabled; see the next paragraph for details). Note that you can only have one active telnet session to the eLua board at any given time.

If you’re under Windows, make sure you’re using a proper telnet client, which basically means "just about everything but the built-in telnet client". PuTTY is a very good and popular choice.

Using standalone eLua on PC

If you build eLua for the i386 platform, you can boot your PC directly in eLua! No underlying OS, nothing but plain eLua. It won’t have any actual peripherals to access, but it can use the term module to run hangman.lua and life.lua, as well as other code examples and games, which makes it a nice demo :) Follow this link for specific informations about the i386 port.

The eLua shell

No matter what’s your physical connection (serial, TCP/IP or you PC’s monitor after booting eLua), after you setup the PC-eLua board connection and press the "RESET" button on your board or simply press ENTER if you’re using the serial connection, you should see the eLua shell prompt (if you enabled the shell in your build, as described here). The shell is a simple interactive command interpreter that allows you to:

  • get help on shell usage with the help command,

  • query the eLua version running on your platform,

  • upload a Lua source file via XMODEM and execute in on board,

  • run the Lua interpreter in interactive mode just like you’d do on a desktop machine.

  • run a Lua program from a file system.

  • list file names and sizes on eLua file systems.

  • list file contents

  • execute file operations (copy, rename, move, delete)

eLua has two different versions of the shell (check here for information about how to enable each of them):

  • the basic version is small (to keep the eLua image small), but functional. The documentation for the basic shell can be found here.

  • the advanced shell (new in 0.9) adds file masks, file operations and other goodies to the basic shell. If you have enough flash on your MCU, this is almost certainly the version that you want. The documentation for the advanced shell can be found here.

Cross-compiling your eLua programs

Cross-compilation is the process of compiling a program on one hardware platform for a different hardware platform (for example, the process of compiling the eLua binary image ona PC for your eLua board). Lua can be cross-compiled, too. By cross-compiling Lua to bytecode on a PC and executing the resulting bytecode directly on your eLua board you have some important advantages:

  • speed: the Lua compiler on the eLua board doesn’t have to compile your Lua source code, it just executes the compiled bytecode.

  • memory: if you’re executing bytecode directly, no more memory is "wasted" on the eLua board for compiling the Lua code to bytecode. Many times this could be a "life saver". If you’re trying to run Lua code directly on your board and you’re getting "not enough memory" errors, you might be able to overcome this by compiling the Lua program on the PC and running the bytecode instead. Also, compiling large Lua programs on your eLua board can lead to stack overflows, which in turn leads to very hard to find errors.

Warning Currently, cross-compilation is not implemented for 64-bit integer only Lua (lualonglong).

In order to use cross-compilation, the two Lua targets (in this case your desktop PC and your eLua board) must be compatible (they should have the same data types, with the same size and the same memory representation). This isn’t true all the time. For example, some gcc toolchains for ARM targets use a very specific representation for double precision numbers (called FPA format) by default, which makes bytecode files generated on the PC with the regular Lua compiler useless on ARM boards. Other toolchains don’t have this problem. Other targets (like AVR32) are big endian, as opposed to Intel PCs that are little endian.

To overcome these kind of problems, a "Lua cross-compilation patch" was posted on the Lua mailing list a while ago, and it was further modified as part of the eLua project to work with ARM targets. This is how to use it (the following instructions were tested on Linux, not Windows, but they should work on Windows too with little or no tweaking):

  • first, make sure that your PC has already a build system installed (gcc, binutils, libc, headers…). You’ll also need to be able to use the Lua based build system (see building for more in-depth instructions).

  • from the eLua base directory, issue this command:

    $ lua cross-lua.lua

You should get a file called luac in the same directory as a result. It’s almost the same as the regular Lua compiler, but it has a few arguments that deal with differences between different targets (shown below in bold):

usage: ./luac [options] [filenames].
Available options are:
-        process stdin
-l       list
-o name  output to file name (default is "luac.out")
-p       parse only
-s       strip debug information
-v       show version information
-cci bits       cross-compile with given integer size
-ccn type bits  cross-compile with given lua_Number type and size
-cce endian     cross-compile with given endianness (big or little)
--       stop handling options

All it’s left to do now is to use the table below to figure out what are the right parameters for using the cross-compiler:

Image type Arch Compiler Command

Floating point (lua)

ARM7TDMI
Cortex-M3
ARM966E-S

arm-gcc

./luac -ccn float_arm 64 -cce little -o <script.luac> -s <script.lua>

Floating point (lua)

ARM7TDMI
Cortex-M3
ARM966E-S

codesoucery

./luac -ccn float 64 -cce little -o <script.luac> -s <script.lua>

Integer (lualong)

ARM7TDMI
Cortex-M3
ARM966E-S

arm-gcc
codesourcery

./luac -ccn int 32 -cce little -o <script.luac> -s <script.lua>

Floating point (lua)

AVR32

avr32-gcc

./luac -ccn float 64 -cce big -o <script.luac> -s <script.lua>

Integer (lualong)

AVR32

avr32-gcc

./luac -ccn int 32 -cce big -o <script.luac> -s <script.lua>

You can omit the -s (strip) parameter from compilation, but this will result in larger bytecode files (as the debug information is not stripped if you don’t use -s).

You can use your bytecode file in multiple ways:

  • write it to the ROM file system and execute it from there.

  • use the recv command from the shell to upload it to the board using a serial connection.

  • write it to an sd/mmc card and, if your board supports it, execute it from there.

Controlling eLua with LuaRPC

Remote procedure calls (RPC) allow one program to communicate with another and call functions or subroutines within the second program. For example one might want to programmatically control an array of LEDs connected to an eLua embedded device from a desktop Lua state. A simple implementation might be a protocol that would allow one to send numeric or text-based commands that would cause code to be executed in eLua that would change the state of the LEDs. As one needs new commands to change these LEDs, one would need to upload a new Lua program to handle changing functionality. In contrast to this ad-hoc method for remote calls, LuaRPC provides a more general way to manipulate the state and execution of a remote Lua environment.

When a client is connected to a LuaRPC server, it can interact with it in the following ways:

  • assign values to new or existing variables in the server state

  • get values from variables in the server state

  • call functions to be executed on the server side using parameters of serializable types, with return values being sent back to the client

  • create local userdata helpers (aliases) which provide short-hand access to remote state

Building the Desktop Client/Server

  • first, make sure that your PC has already a build system installed (gcc, binutils, libc, headers…). You’ll also need to be able to use the Lua based build system (see building for more instructions).

  • from the <b>eLua</b> base directory, issue this command:

    $ lua rpc-lua.lua

You should get a file called luarpc in the same directory which, when started, should give you a normal Lua interpreter with a built-in rpc module.

Building eLua with RPC Boot

See building for details and requirements for the building process. In order to boot into RPC mode, the RPC component will need to be enabled, and appropriate static configuration data needs to be set. To build eLua to boot into RPC mode, include boot=luarpc in the build options.

LuaRPC Basics

In terms of the LED example from the beginning of this section, one could directly call pio module functions from the desktop side, experimenting with responses. If the experimentation developed into a program this could be tested both on the desktop side and on the microcontroller by making aliases to eLua modules in local Lua state. Such aliasing can be done as follows:

-- open connection from Linux host serial port to eLua
slave,err = rpc.connect("/dev/ttyUSB0")

-- make a local helper pointing to pio module in eLua
pio = slave.pio

-- define function to set direction and value of port B
function set_port_val(val)
  pio.port.setdir( pio.OUTPUT, pio.PB )
  pio.port.setval( val, pio.PB )
end

set_port_val(23)

When we run this locally, calling and indexing helpers are translated into appropriate actions on the server. If we were done with modifications to the above function and wanted it to execute in eLua rather than using local aliases, which will result in a great deal of RPC traffic every time the function is called, we can send the function to the remote side:

-- cross-compile local chunk for function and send to server
slave.set_port_val = set_port_val

-- call function on server device
slave.set_port_val(23)

In addition to functions, we can also copy most other Lua types from client to server using simple assignment. Due to Lua’s internal workings the opposite operation of copying Lua types from server to client requires an additional metamethod:

-- make table on remote server
slave.remote_table = {}

-- put data in table
slave.remote_table.rval = 42

-- get data back from server, print
local_table = slave.remote_table:get()
print(local_table.rval)

While these examples are trivial, they serve to illustrate a compelling development paradigm that gives one a great deal of flexibility for development and testing with an embedded target.

Serializable Lua Types

Most Lua types can be transferred between the client and server states. The following list indicates which ones can be transferred, and where there are known exceptions:

Serializable types Exceptions and notes

Numbers

Strings

Booleans

Tables

No circular references

Functions

No upvalues

nil