Show HN: Microcontroller with hardware-accelerated Lua VM

About

The ELM11 is a microcontroller board. Key features include:

• Executes Lua, from either:
  • REPL
    • There a standalone REPL for each CPU core.
  • Program(s) stored on the Flash
• CPU customization
  • Frequency
  • Number of cores
  • Hardware-acceleration of the Lua VM ^[1]
    • A document that provides a basic reference of the hardware-acceleration performance is available here.
• Support for standard digital I/O protocols, including:
  • GPIO, PWM, UART, SPI, I2C
• Interrupts, including:
  • GPIO level and transition
  • UART, SPI and I2C receive data
• Timers
• Watchdog
  • Hardware-based
• Run-time reconfigurable hardware
  • For example, I/O type, frequency, boot configuration etc. See the ‘Documentation’ section of this page for more information.
• Compile-time reconfigurable hardware
  • For example, CPU frequency, I/O run-time capabilities etc. See the ‘Documentation’ section of this page for more information.

Image

Documentation

Preliminary documentation is available for download here.

Further documentation on the embLua OS is available online or as a downloadable document.

Purchase

Available (unless sold out) for pre-order from 28/07/2025.

Shipping from 01/11/2025.

References

[1] Still in Beta – not available as part of the default (i.e. shipped with) firmware.