Tsctl
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| Files | |
|---|---|
| Latest tsctl sources |
Overview
Tsctl was created as a way to ease software development, allow programs developed for one board to be easily re-used on other boards, and provide a way to control boards from any language and operating system that supports TCP/IP. You can also write your program to talk directly to the hardware via libtsctl. Tsctl has a consistent client API across all access methods. Currently it supports programming in C, Python, shell, Javascript, and Java, as well as any other language in which you can write code to talk to a TCP socket. tsctl is object oriented, and currently defines classes for AIO (Analog I/O, i.e. DAC and ADC), Bus (useful for direct register access), CAN, DIO, EDIO (Extended DIO for PWM, Quadrature counting and more), Pin, Time (timekeeping), TWI, and SPI hardware as well as a System class. Tsctl server runs as a single (user-space) multi-threaded server instance on the board to provide access to board features over TCP/IP.
The older canctl, dioctl, and spictl servers are implemented as libtsctl applications to provide the ability to run those applications on any hardware supported by tsctl.
Support
The following boards are currently supported by tsctl:
| TS-Socket CPU |
|---|
| TS-4200 |
| TS-4500 |
| TS-4700 |
| TS-4800 |
| TS-Socket Baseboards |
| TS-8100 |
| TS-8160 |
| TS-8200 |
| TS-8390 |
| TS-8820 |
| TS-8900 |
| TS Single Board Computers |
| TS-7552 |
| TS-7553 |
| TS-7558 |
| PC-104 Peripheral Boards |
| TS-RELAY8 |
| TS-DIO24 |
Design Philosophy
Technologic System develops and manufactures single-board computers. Newly designed boards have features and configuration intended to meet newly emerging needs in the marketplace, as well as to respond to customer feedback concerning what is useful to them. However, over time many boards developed by Technologic Systems share in common certain features such as Ethernet, serial ports, CAN, and so forth. Some of these features are well supported by the Linux operating system which our boards ship with. However some are not, and in other cases the interface to accessing a particular feature has changed over time, sometimes dramatically.
Technologic System products are targeted towards the embedded market. The software development model in this space is often quite different from the rest of the software industry. Embedded devices typically go through a development cycle which terminates in a "frozen" state for all software on the board. Unlike other parts of the industry, upgrades or change of any kind in the state of the software as shipped is undesirable as it represents a high degrees of risk, risk that assumptions other software relies on will no longer be valid resulting in "breakage" of previously working software. As such, it is important that Technologic System provide software for the features on its board which reaches a frozen state quickly, allowing developers using our products to confidently freeze their own software in a timely manner.
At the same time, there are other important, but sometimes conflicting goals. These are:
- To bring new products to market quickly.
- To provide software for all the features on the board.
- To have a uniform interface to each feature allowing code developed for one board to work on another.
To meet these goals, tsctl does the following:
- defines object classes, which encapsulates a specific piece of TS hardware behind a standard, uniform API across all supported TS products.
- provides easy extensibility to add new objects and new API calls on existing objects without breaking any existing code.
- provides a single, centralized, self-contained, backward compatible binary for each platform containing all TS functionality (which conforms to the tsctl spec)
- utilizes pthreads, which allows for high performance locking of individual resources
- provides a consistent interface across C, text and binary protocols, and various languages facilitates backward compatibility at the command line and protocol level with canctl, dioctl, and spictl
- optimizes individual objects for maximum performance where applicable, i.e. CAN which can transmit and receive close to wire speed at 1Mbps via the high performance canctl protocol.
- provides the new tsctl network protocol which allows all objects to be used through a single port, providing sequentiality and simultaneous access to multiple objects through the same protocol and connection.