The Lisp Badge mini computer has turned out to be quite useful and fun for little hardware hacking projects. Its designer, David Johnson-Davies, suggested that the SMART Response XE would make a good off-the-shelf uLisp computer, eliminating the need to build one from scratch.

I ordered a few SMART Response XEs from an auction site to see what was possible. I found Larry Bank‘s excellent Arduino library and fdufnews‘s schematics, which provided a great starting point. With guidance from David, I completed an initial uLisp port:

To load the code, I use an ISP programmer and a special PCB with POGO pins:

On Debian, I run:

make ispload

to load LispBadge.ino without a bootloader.

The SMART Response XE uses the ATmega128RFA1 microcontroller, which has a ZigBee IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver. David and I are discussing adding uLisp functions to make use of this capability.