Hi all.
I've done a collaboration with @Igor, the creator of Armbian.
He shows and talks about the hardware that is used to maintain the project. Servers, boards, other electronics, ...
Enjoy!
I was chatting with @tido about ways to help the Armbian community and I came up with the idea of a common C library to access the I2C, SPI and GPIOs of all supported boards. There are of course kernel drivers to communicate with these things, but there are differences between boards that this API could help smooth out. For example, different CPUs (and boards) map the GPIO pins very differently. Projects such as WiringOP and WiringNP try to copy the Raspberry Pi library, but this is also flawed because it's based on the BCM283x GPIO numbering. What I propose is to create a set of simple functions for accessing GPIO pins using the physical pin number as a reference. On all boards, the 5V pin will be considered pin 2 and the numbering goes from there. There are also sometimes pushbuttons present on the board which are mapped to GPIO inputs. These are also covered by my API. Much of the code is already written and I will release it shortly. I'm posting this topic to get feedback and to reach out to people who might make use of this. Here is a list of the functions so far:
int AIOInit(void);
void AIOShutdown(void);
const char * AIOGetBoardName(void);
int AIOOpenI2C(int iChannel, int iAddress);
int AIOOpenSPI(int iChannel, int iSpeed);
int AIOCloseI2C(int iHandle);
int AIOCloseSPI(int iHandle);
int AIOReadI2C(int iHandle, int iRegister, unsigned char *buf, int iCount);
int AIOWriteI2C(int iHandle, int iRegister, unsigned char *buf, int iCount);
int AIOReadSPI(int iHandle, unsigned char *buf, int iCount);
int AIOWriteSPI(int iHandle, unsigned char *buf, int iCount);
int AIOReadWriteSPI(int iHandle, unsigned char *inbuf, unsigned char *outbuf, int iCount);
int AIOReadButton(void);
int AIOAddPin(int iPin, int iDirection);
int AIORemovePin(int iPin);
int AIOReadPin(int iPin);
int AIOWritePin(int iPin, int iValue);
