https://github.com/sgjava/userspaceio already does this, but using the latest userspace libraries. I took a peek at mraa and the gpio source uses sysfs which is deprecated. See https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/11/26/sysfs-is-dead-long-live-libgpiod-libgpiod-for-linux-circuitpython/ No need to bake this into Armbian in my opinion. Also, I can install Userspace IO on other Linux distributions besides Armbian, so I'm not limited to a distribution.
This whole idea of mapping pins the same seems kind of silly to me since a lot of my SBCs have a variable number of GPIO pins, some have multiple I2C, some have multi purpose pins, etc. This is something that should be done a layer above the actual APIs and is trivial to implement (using a pin map or table).
There's no wheel reinvention going on here. I started Userspace IO over 2 years ago and it still remains the only true cross SBC API (there is no need to detect board type). Basically if your kernel is > 4.8 and supports devices mapped to userspace then it should work. mraa has limited ARM support (Pi is the only ARM SBC supported that I have out of 10 different SBCs).
As far as non-root access see https://github.com/sgjava/userspaceio#non-root-access
I'd love to just install Linux and have everything working, but that's not reality now. I'm not dissing mraa, but it's not something I'd use personally.
GoGerriko reacted to sgjava in Providing MRAA as common GPIO Library as a Replacement for WiringPi