hdcproto 0.0.8

Host Device Communication protocol

The HDC protocol

The purpose of the Host Device Communication protocol is to simplify the communication between the firmware of a device with severely limited computing resources and the software on the computer to which it's connected via a serial communication link, like UART / USB-CDC / Virtual COM Port.

Python implementation of the HDC protocol

The hdcproto package contains the Python implementation of the HDC protocol, and it's mainly meant for the implementation of HDC-host software.

Implementing HDC-devices in Python offers some interesting possibilities:

• Mocking an HDC-device:
  • For demonstration purposes of the HDC-host software, whenever a physical device is not available.
  • For testing purposes, to create test-scenarios for the HDC-host software, which would otherwise be difficult to recreate on a physical HDC-device. e.g.: A Continuous Integration build server.
• Implementing an actual HDC-device on sufficiently powerful hardware:
  • Because you can. ;-)
  • In most cases, though, you would be better off using more conventional technologies like gRPC or RESTful API

WARNING: The HDC-device implementation in the hdcproto package is still work in progress.

Installation

The hdcproto package is currently in pre-alpha stage, thus might be not listed by default in your graphical package management tool.
You can install it into your project's virtual environment via the usual command:

pip install hdcproto

Attention testers!

Installing from the alternative Test-PyPi repository is a bit trickier:

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple/ hdcproto

Alternatively, if you take care of installing any missing dependency yourself:

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --no-deps hdcproto

Usage

The hdcproto.host.proxy module implements generic proxy base-classes that can be used as building blocks to define proxy-classes that are specific for a given device and provide a convenient API for the HDC-host software to interact with the HDC-device.

Have a look at the hdcproto.demo.minimal sub-package, where you'll see an example of how proxy-classes are defined and how they are used to communicate with an HDC-device running the Demo_Minimal firmware example.