What is eLua?

eLua stands for Embedded Lua and the project aims to offer the full implementation of the Lua Programming Language to the embedded world, extending it with specific features for efficient and portable software embedded development.

General Features

eLua allows you to develop and run Lua programs on a wide variety of microcontrollers.

Some aspects of eLua are:

  • Transforms hardware in commodity: Design and code your products for eLua and make them as hardware-independent as possible. Upgrade or completely change your hardware in the future and save time and money, using the approved source code with little or no modifications.

  • Source code portability: Like in Lua, you program in C, Lua or a mixture of both and your program runs in a wide varied of (sometimes radically different) platforms and architectures supported. Full control of the platform.: eLua runs on the "bare-metal". There is no Operating System between your programs and the microcontroller. Develop on targets: fully functional Lua and a dedicated shell on the microcontroller itself. No need to install a specific development environment on the PC side, other than a serial or ehternet console/terminal emulator. You can also use any text editor, save your programs in sd/mmc and other media and use them directly in your platforms.

  • Flexible products: Add modern high level script-language capabilities to your projects, resulting in highly adaptable, field-programable and reconfigurable designs. Efficient (and cheap!) future evolution to your systems.

  • Learn embedded: Simple interactive and interpreted experimenting cycle. Use your desktop programming skills to become an embedded systems developer in no time and with a lot of fun.

  • Embedded RAD: Prototype and experiment on a Rapid Aplication Develop model. Test your ideas directly on the target platforms and cheap development kits. No need for simulators or future code adaptations.

  • Ready to use kits: A big (and growing!) number of Open Source hardware and commercially available platforms supported. Prototype cheap and fast and design your final hardware later using the produced code.

  • Longevity: Add user configuration and scripting capabilities to your projects, making them adaptable to the always changing contexts of industrial processes, evolving engineering, automation standards, field optimizations etc…

  • Worry-free Licence: eLua is free and open-source software and we promote it as much as we can. But our MIT licence (the same as Lua’s) allows you to use eLua in your commercial and private-code products as well. Nothing to ask, no royalties to pay, just tell the world you’re using eLua.

For more information about the functionality (implemented and planned) in eLua check our status page.

Audience

eLua has a wide and varied audience, starting from newcomers to the embedded world who want an easy and powerful environment for prototyping, rapid application development and quick production, and ranging towards highly skilled developers that want to extend their programs with the high-level Lua libraries and portable features.

eLua allows embedded-oriented programmers to use the simplicity and power of the Lua programming language and to hide the low-level complexities and platform/architecture-dependent features. With eLua, the programmer can focus on the actual implementation of his program, without having to worry about accessing the low-level peripheral configuration and data registers, as the platform libraries already take care of this. This increases productivity and eliminates the often frustrating task of dealing with platform-specific drivers.

The list below summarizes eLua's target audience:

  • Embedded developers that are looking for a fast, easy to use and powerful way of coding.

  • First-time embedded programmers (or simply first time programmers) who are looking for an easy way to "dive" into the embedded programming world. eLua is a great learning tool.

  • People that aren’t really developers, but still want to be able to prototype an embedded system fast and painless, without having to learn C for that. Embedded developers who need powerful meta-language mechanisms for complex code algorithms and data description.

  • Field engineers that can go to their customer site and debug an eLua module on site, without any preparation at all, since the whole development environment resides on chip already.

  • Final clients and decision makers, who benefits from the fact that eLua portability transforms hardware into comodities. In systems using eLua, replacing field sensor and actuator controllers by diferent models, brands and architectures have no impact on the main application software.

Current Status

The project is very active and the worldwide distributed collaboration has been growing steadly. Manufacturers, user’s companies and other organizations are also starting to collaborate and support the project.

The current official version is eLua v0.8 and we have released 9 versions since the project was published.

Supported platforms and features include a wide range of microcontroller families and architectures. A list of currently supported platforms, peripherals and features can be seen in our Status page

Authors

eLua is a joint project of Bogdan Marinescu, a software developer from Bucharest, Romania and Dado Sutter, head of the Led Lab at PUC-Rio University, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Its origins come from the ReVaLuaTe project, also developed by Bogdan Marinescu (as a contest entry for the 2005 Renesas M16C Design Contest), and the Volta Project, managed by Dado Sutter at PUC-Rio from 2005 to 2007.

eLua is developed in an fully open, distributed and colaborative model. An always growing list of collaborators from all over the planet can be found in our Credits Page.

ReVaLuaTe Project Volta Project

ReVaLuaTe project picture

Volta project picture

Contacts

eLua authors and main developers can be contacted at:

Bogdan Marinescu: bogdan.marinescu -at- gmail -dot- com

Dado Sutter: dadosutter -at- gmail -dot- com

James Snyder: jbsnyder -at- gmail -dot- com

You are also welcomed to share your questions and suggestions on our Mail Discussion List

License

eLua is Open Source and is freely distributed under the MIT license.

The Lua code (with all the eLua specific changes) is included in the source tree and is, of course, licensed under the same MIT license that Lua uses.

Other (few) components have different licenses. Please see the file LICENSE in the source distribution for details.

The Lua part of eLua is licensed under the Lua licensing terms, which you can find at http://www.lua.org/license.html.

The XMODEM code is adapted from the FreeBSD at91 library, which was written by M. Warner Losh and is released under the BSD license.

The "pack" module is adapted from the "lpack" module by Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and it’s placed in the public domain.

The "bit" module is adapted from the "bitlib" library by Reuben Thomas, distributed under a MIT license.

The "integer only lua" is based on the "Go Long Lua!" patch by John D. Ramsdell (from the Lua Power Patches page) and is placed in the public domain.

The multiple memory allocator (dlmalloc) is written by Doug Lea and is placed on the public domain.

The TCP/IP stack is adapted from uIP, written by Adam Dunkels and released under a BSD license.

The FAT file sistem is based on FatFs, written by Elm Chan. A copy of the FatFs license can be found in the LICENSE.fatfs file.

The RPC implementation is based on Russell Smith’s Lua-RPC A copy of the Lua-RPC license can be found in the LICENSE.luarpc file.

Manufacturer provided CPU support libraries are licensed under their own terms. Check src/platform/platform-name for details of each license.

linenoise (eLua's readline replacement) is released under a BSD license.

The rest of the eLua code is licensed under MIT.