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Snek — a tiny python-inspired language for embedded computing

Snek is a tiny embeddable language targeting processors with only a few kB of flash and ram. Think of something that would have been running BASIC years ago and you'll have the idea. These processors are too small to run MicroPython.

Documentation

• The Snek Home Page provides more information about the language and community.

• Snek Manual in HTML format

• Snek Manual in PDF format

Downloads

• Snek is packaged for Debian and is available for the unstable release.

• Packages for Linux, including older versions of Debian, Mac OS X and Windows are available in the Snek Dist directory

Supported Hardware

Snek supports analog and digital I/O operations on all of these boards. Snek also has some support for built-in devices on boards as described below.

• Adafruit Crickit. This is sold as an expansion board for other Adafruit products, but Snek is able to run on the local processor. Snek supports the motor controllers and Neopixel.

• Arduino Duemilanove.

• Adafruit Feather M0 Express. Snek supports digital and analog input and output with this device.

• Seeed Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino. Snek supports the LED, Buzzer, Light, Sound, OLED Display, Button, Rotary Potentiometer and 3-axis Accelerometer.

• Adafruit ItsyBitsy 32u4 - 5V, Adafruit ItsyBitsy 32u4 - 3V.

• Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0 Express

• Arduino Mega 2560

• Adafruit METRO M0 Express

• Arduino Nano 33 IoT

• Crowd Supply 1284 Narrow

• Circuit Playground Express. Snek supports the NeoPixels, sound, light sensor and temperature sensor. It does not support the accelerometer yet.

• Snekboard. This board was designed to run Snek and control Lego Power Function motors.

• Crowd Supply µduino. This board doesn't have any access to the programming pins, so you'd need to get Snek pre-programmed before it was split off of the carrier board.

• Arduino Uno. This is pretty much the same as a Duemilanove board, but with a different USB to serial converter.

• Seeeduino XIAO.

• LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3. Snek supports EV3 motors and sensors.

• Seeed Grove Beginner Kit. The port includes drivers for everything except the temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors.

• Narrow 1284.

• Arduino Nano Every. This uses flash for storage, and includes most of the math library and the tone driver.

• LilyPad Arduino 328. This port leaves out dictionaries and slices so that it has space for the tone driver.

To Do list

• Convert parser from LL to SLR. The hope here is to reduce the amount of parse stack space needed due to the large number of precedence levels in the language.

Recent Changes

Here's some places that have seen recent work

• Remove the -big variants. The variants supporting boot loaders now have sufficient space to support all of the options formerly reserved for the -big ones.

• Rewrite the ATmel chip support to use __flash attributes. Target newer GCC version. With these changes, there's lots more space available on ATmel targets.

• Changed the builtin math, time and random functions to no longer include the math., time. or random. prefixes. This makes them more convenient to use. To retain compatibility with Python, you can use 'from math import *' which Snek will ignore.

• Mu version 1.2.0 has Snek support built in now. Mu is an IDE designed for new Python users that offers a more polished alternative to the simple Snek IDE provide with snek.

• Fixed a couple of input bugs compared with Python—input returned None instead of the empty string when nothing was typed before the return and input printed an arbitrary list of parameters rather than just the first one. Thanks to Justin Miller and Mikael Bonnier for reporting these issues.

• Store the most recently printed repl value in _. Thanks to Justin Miller for this suggestion.

• For the Windows native port, add the input module and increase the heap size to 256kB.

• Update the docs to format correctly with asciidoctor-pdf version 2.3

• LilyPad Arduino 328 port. This is a round ATmega328p-based board designed for wearable projects. This board runs at 8MHz, which can't run the serial port at 115.2kbaud, so it runs at 57.6k instead. Thanks to Douglas Fraser for this.

• Support multiple baud rates in snekde, auto-detect baud rate when connecting to non-USB based devices.

• Fix NaN comparisons and make dicts containing NaN keys work. Jake Edge's article, “Revisiting NaNs in Python” led to the discovery that Snek had several bugs in NaN comparisons. Snek now computes the right value for comparisons with Nan, as well as permitting NaN to be used as a key in dictionaries.

• Support explicit serial synchronization using ENQ/ACK so that applications sending lots of data do not require OS flow control support. With many devices connecting via USB/serial adapters that do not provide any flow control, adding explicit flow control to the Snek implementation provides a way to make downloading code reliable for them.

• Fixed incorrect precedence between bitwise and (&) and bitwise xor (^) operators.

Build and Run!

If you want to build Snek yourself, you'll need to have the build tools and other dependencies installed.

Dependencies

To build Snek you need these dependencies:

• Lola
• gawk
• gcc-avr
• avr-libc
• gcc-arm-none-eabi
• gcc-riscv64-unknown-elf
• gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi
• picolibc
• python3
• pyserial
• python curses
• readline
• asciidoctor
• asciidoctor-pdf

On Debian unstable, you can get everything from the main archive:

# apt install lola gcc-avr avr-libc python3-serial gawk \
      gcc-arm-none-eabi gcc-riscv64-unknown-elf libreadline-dev \
  picolibc-arm-none-eabi picolibc-riscv64-unknown-elf \
  asciidoctor ruby-asciidoctor-pdf gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi

Debian stable has too old a version of lola, so if you're using that, you'll need to install lola from the git repository above.

The snek build scripts use the GNU awk implementation, gawk, including a GNU extension, strtonum, which is not available in other awk implementations. It's not critical to compiling the code as it's only used to print out ROM usage for AVR targets so you can tell how much space is still available, but if you don't have gawk, you will get build failures.

Building and install

Here are some useful options to control the build. Each of these is run from the top level directory.

$ make

If you just type 'make', the system will build all of the embedded binaries and a native binary to run locally.

$ make install

'make install' will copy all of the built programs to /usr/local

$ make PREFIX=$HOME/.local

This compiles everything to run from your home directory, instead of /usr/local.

$ make PREFIX=$HOME/.local install

Make sure you use the same PREFIX value every time you run make so that the snek install scripts (which get PREFIX embedded in them) that are installed know where to find the snek binaries for each device.

Running on Embedded Devices

Snek is designed to run on small embedded devices with 32kB or more of flash and 2kB or more of RAM. Snek has been ported to a variety of embedded devices, providing access to pins as GPIOs as well as some built-in peripherals. Documentation about the supported boards can be found in the Snek Manual.

Running on Linux, Mac OS X Windows

Snek is also built to run natively on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. When installed, you'll find it available in the regular system menu.

The Mu Editor

mu is an IDE especially designed for new Python developers. It has support for boards running snek upstream, but no release has been made with that code yet.

The Snek Development Environment

Snekde is provided on all three platforms; you'll find it in the system menu on Linux and Windows and down in your personal Applications directory on Mac OS X.

The snekde window is split into two parts. The upper 2/3 is a text editor for source code. The bottom 1/3 lets you interact with the Snek device over the USB port. The very top line lists functions that you can invoke by pressing the associated function key:

• F1 — Device. Connect to a serial port.
• F2 — Get. Get source code saved to the Snek device eeprom into the editor pane.
• F3 — Put. Put code from the editor pane into the Snek device eeprom.
• F4 — Quit. Exit snekde.
• F5 — Load. Read source code from the file system into the editor pane.
• F6 — Save. Write source code from the editor pane to the file system.

There are a couple more keybindings which you'll want to know:

• Page-up/Page-down — Switch between the editor pane and the interaction pane.
• Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V — Usual cut/copy/paste commands.
• Ctrl-C — In the interaction pane, this interrupts any snek program running on the device. Note that this means you don't get a Copy command in the interaction pane.
• Ctrl-Z — Undo.

Tab auto-indents the current line. Backspace backs up over a tab stop when appropriate.

Examples

There are examples provided, some of which work with both Python and Snek, and some of which show how to use SoC-specific APIs that aren't available in Python.

Contributions

I'd love to receive more contributions in the form of patches, suggestions and bug reports. Please feel free to send mail or use the github process. I've created a mailing list for collaboration; you'll need to subscribe to be able to post. Subscribe to the snek mailing list here

Releases

Here are more specific notes about Snek releases.

Version 1.8

• Add 'str' builtin. Just like Python, the str builtin converts any value to a string.

• Fix 'chained' comparisons (e.g. a < b < c). These generated incorrect code that left the stack messed up unless all comparisons were true.

• Allow 3 * 'a' as well as 'a' * 3. The code for evaluating expressions only permitted the string to be on the left side.

• Add support in snekde for auto-detecting device baud rate between 57600 and 115200 baud.

• Add port to the ATMega 328 based LilyPad, in both the regular size as well as the big version which replaces the boot loader to gain more functionality.

Version 1.7

• Fix NaN comparisons and make dicts containing NaN keys work. Jake Edge's article, “Revisiting NaNs in Python” led to the discovery that Snek had several bugs in NaN comparisons. Snek now computes the right value for comparisons with Nan, as well as permitting NaN to be used as a key in dictionaries.

• Add math functions to nano-every port; the ATmega4809 has plenty of flash space for these.

Version 1.6

• Support explicit serial synchronization using ENQ/ACK so that applications sending lots of data do not require OS flow control support. With many devices connecting via USB/serial adapters that do not provide any flow control, adding explicit flow control to the Snek implementation provides a way to make downloading code reliable for them.

• Fixed incorrect precedence between bitwise and (&) and bitwise xor (^) operators.

• Lots of improvements to the EV3 port making it more like other Snek devices.

• Narrow 1284 port. This is a small board with the ATmega1284 SoC which is like the ATmega328 but with much more Flash and RAM which provides way more room for Snek to run.

• Seeed Grove Beginner Kit port. This is another ATmega328p based board but with a range of devices provided in the kit. Snek supports the LED, Buzzer, Light, Sound, OLED Display, Button, Rotary Potentiometer and 3-axis Accelerometer.

• Seeeduino XIAO port. This is a SAMD21-based device on a tiny board with a USB-C connector.

• Arduino Nano Every port. This uses the ATmega4809 which has 6kB of RAM, providing much more space for Snek programs.

Version 1.5

• Arduino Uno port. This port, is mostly the same as the Duemilanove port but includes replacement firmware for the Atmega 16u2 on the Uno board which acts as the USB interface.

• Handle 'chained' comparison operators (a < b < c) correctly.

• Add sound output support for the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express board.

• Use Optiboot on the Duemilanove board so that Snek can be replaced without needing a separate programming device.

Version 1.4

• LEGO EV3 port. This port, done by Mikhail Gusarov, includes custom functions for the motors and sensors.

• HiFive1 Rev B port. This uses a bunch of code from for all of the core and device support.

• Lots of bugs fixed in string interpolation.

• Lessons using LEGO with Snekboard There are four lessons that show you how to build a simple robot with step-by-step construction information, and then explore programming on a Snekboard.

• Improved time.sleep precision. time.sleep is now accurate to the resolution of the timer. On a Duemilanove, that's 4µs. time.monotonic still returns a float, so the longer the board has been running, the lower the precision...

• Support for optiboot in Duemilanove code. Once you've installed optiboot on your Duemilanove, you can install Snek using that over the USB port, instead of needing an ISP.

Version 1.3

• Ports to ESP32 and µduino

• Memory-corruption bug in string interpolation fixed

• Bunch of code refactoring saves some space

• Master now tested after every push on github