Make With Ada Promo 968289522 5e724cf187bbb

They Made It with Ada and SPARK

March 18, 2020

Judge and Editor Bill Wong reviews the results of the “Make with Ada” programming competition.

>> Website Resources
.. >> Library: TechXchange
.. .. >> TechXchange: Embedded Software
.. .. .. >> Topic: Ada and SPARK

The AdaCore Make with Ada competition has a winner. The competition is one I helped to judge—I’m very interested in spreading the word about SPARK and Ada. I’ve been doing this for a number of years and have seen some amazing improvement in the quality of the projects and in the use of SPARK.

SPARK is a provable subset of Ada that takes advantage of Ada 2012’s contract support. A number of projects employed this feature, including the winner.

“I am happy that this year we decided to highlight and reward more projects than in the previous editions,” said Fabien Chouteau, AdaCore software engineer, and author of the Make with Ada blog post series. “Make with Ada competitions have always been full of creative and innovative projects, and this year was no exception.”

John Singleton was awarded $2,000 for his SmartBase IoT Adjustable Bed project (Fig. 1). The project resulted in an IoT device that controls the movement of a wired, adjustable bed. The system can sense occupancy in the room and even produces under-bed safety lighting when someone is walking around at night. The system can be controlled by both an Amazon Alexa device as well as the original remote.

1. It may not look like much, but the SmartBase makes an adjustable bed safer and easier to use.

The Student Prize was awarded to Team ADArrose. The four-student team used an STMicroelectronics STM32F429 board to run an automated plant sprinkler system (Fig. 2). The system monitors and records soil humidity and surrounding luminosity. It automatically sprinkles the plants with the right amount of water to keep it well-hydrated. The system has multiple operating modes and will send an alert when an abnormal condition is detected.

2. The student winner was Team ADArrose with an automated plant sprinkler system.

The students used a formal development process with high-level requirements, low-level requirements, test cases, and contract-based programming. The student award was a Digilent Analog Discovery 2 Pro Bundle. It’s a nice platform that I reviewed a while back.

All of the projects are posted on hackster.io for your perusal. Check out You Can Now Learn SPARK and Ada Online if you have a hankering to learn to program in SPARK and Ada.

Just in case you might think Ada and SPARK are going to cost a lot to use, check out “Ada—The Language of Cost Savings?,” “Learning from an Ada Neophyte,” and “11 Myths About Ada.”

>> Website Resources
.. >> Library: TechXchange
.. .. >> TechXchange: Embedded Software
.. .. .. >> Topic: Ada and SPARK

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.