Welcome to GTOR's Commboard Transmission Library. This library is designed to help store sensor data and compress it to reduce transmitted packet sizes. It can also convert the data to a JSON format for easy storage and or graphing. This library is designed specifically for the BAJA SAE Offroad competition, but we feel it could be useful for a wide variety of other purposes. This library is open source, and we would love for other teams or individuals to use, contribute, and or provide feedback to this piece of software. If you have any questions, do not hestitate to contact us.
This library is designed as an Arduino header only library. Our implementation of this library is in a SEPERATE repository. This library heavily uses Template Meta Programming ("TMP"). The goal of this is to allow the user, in one place, define the common context of their sensors: data type, compression functions, etc., and have the necessary changes to accomodate this be carried out by the program. TMP can become quickly convoluted (chiefly because its depth of usage was never an intended language feature), but in essence, it allows the programmer to specify create classes, functions, etc. that are self modifying, dependent on the template arguments supplied by the library user. This is my effort at a poor explanation, please read more if you are interested.
The advantage of this system is that you only need to specifiy your sensor configuration once, the SensorData<> class will handle the rest. The downside is, because TMP resolves during compile-time, if there is an error, it will cascade into a waterfall of errors as (failed) substitutions through SensorData<> are performed.
My advice is to work slowly. Look at our implementation for inspiration. My advice is to start by defining your first sensor in a seperate header file, in our other repo look at src/Sensors for examples. Then in your equivalent of DAQSensors.h, define (with using) a type of std::tuple<YourNewSensorClassType>. This is metaprogramming, anything involved must be known at compile time. That is why we define types instead of declaring variables. Define another type (corresponding with DAQSensorDataType in src/DAQInfrastructure/DAQSensors.h) of type SensorData<MyTupleTypeDefinedInThePreviousStep>. Now COMPILE! If this works, add another sensor, rinse, wash, and repeat.
To compile, this library will need access to boost libraries (specifically endian and mp11). We maintain a fork of BoostForArduino that can be found here. If you are compiling with Arduino, install our version of BoostForArduino beforehand. Please let us know if you have any questions, we would be glad to help you.
We test all of our libraries in our main repository. Please not that most of the useful testing is found in our implementation of this infrastructure library, found here. This is our actual up-to date code that we use for our vehicle's sensor configuration. However, if you would like to test this library locally, please download our version of BoostForArduino. You will then need to add Add BoostForArduino's src dir to this library's include path. We already reference a library named BoostForArduino in this repo's CMakeLists.txt to work with our main repository. If you would like to test or use this library, these steps below will help you get started.
- Install CMake
- Download BoostForArduino and place in this repo's main folder.
- Add the following to lines to ./CMakeLists.txt BEFORE
target_link_libraries(CommboardTransmissionLibrary INTERFACE BinaryBuffer BoostForArduino):
add_library(BoostForArduino INTERFACE) target_include_directories(BoostForArduino INTERFACE BoostForArduino/src)
- Initialize and build CMake as normal. E.x run:
cmake . -B build cmake --build .
- Run unit tests (optional)
ctest