I wonder if this could be modified to control actual hardware? It looks the `\write18` command can be used to execute shell commands if LaTeX is run with the `--shell-escape` option. So in theory you could intercept all writes to the GPIO control registers and use a shell command to send bytes over the serial port to a physical MCU (or something like the SparkFun SPI Shortcut.)
Imagine a LaTeX document that, when processed, reads a series of measurements from a sensor over the serial port, then renders nice graphs directly to a PDF! :)
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I wonder if this could be modified to control actual hardware? It looks the `\write18` command can be used to execute shell commands if LaTeX is run with the `--shell-escape` option. So in theory you could intercept all writes to the GPIO control registers and use a shell command to send bytes over the serial port to a physical MCU (or something like the SparkFun SPI Shortcut.)
Imagine a LaTeX document that, when processed, reads a series of measurements from a sensor over the serial port, then renders nice graphs directly to a PDF! :)
I was looking for this workflow for my research, and ended up going with an ipython notebook.