Host implementation of the Crow serial protocol.
Project description
Crow Serial Protocol Implementation
Status: experimental
The Crow protocol is designed to allow a PC to control several microcontrollers using a single serial line. The protocol itself has a simple half-duplex, command/response format with basic error checking provided by Fletcher-16 checksums.
In Crow, the top-level software that generates commands is called a client. The client runs on the host, and it passes the command to a host implementation. The host implementation creates a command packet and sends it over the serial line. A device implementation receives the packet and then passes the command to a service running on that device. The service performs the command and may send a response, depending on the circumstances.
A command has the following properties:
- address: 1-31 for a specific device, or 0 to broadcast to all devices.
- port: 0-255, where open ports are registered to specific services.
- response expected: if true, the host will wait for a response; if false, the device must not respond.
- payload: 0-2047 bytes of binary data.
A response has just one property, the payload, which is also 0-2047 bytes of binary data.
This project contains a host implementation as well as a Crow admin client.
The Crow admin client can be used to send the commands ping
, echo
, host_presence
,
get_device_info
, get_open_ports
, and get_port_info
.
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