Train of Thought

An important goal for Yarg is to make interrupt handling ‘just code’, readable and writable with the same language as the rest of the program. A straightforward example is responding to a button press.

This simple sounding act will become more complex in future versions, as it will be important to support ‘debouncing’ of the button in software. Skipping that for now, ‘hello_button.ya‘ uses a circuit with a Pico to light an LED when a button is pressed. Hold the button down to keep the LED illuminated.

The circuit needed:

Connected to GPIO 12 is an LED and a 220ohm resistor. Connected to GPIO11 is a tactile pushbutton.

Whatever the future holds for Yarg, I hope it becomes a project others have interest in, use and contribute to. I hope that many people will choose to contribute over time, and that it finds a wide collection of users.

As such, I’ve moved the repo from my own GitHub account into one for an ‘organisation’: yarg-lang. This should make it easier to separate from my personal work over time, and make it clearer what others can contribute to. Yarg’s new code home is:

https://github.com/yarg-lang/yarg-lang

I spoke at Raspberry Pint London on the 28th October. I introduced Yarg in the context of the project that inspired it – a stepper controller for a model railway. My talk was: ‘Yarg Language: Over-engineering a model railway controller’. I hopefully included some thoughts about why I started down the path of a new language. The talk was in-person and online, and Raspberry Pint meets every month.

YouTube are hosting a recording of the talk.