The purpose of the new I/O interface is to provide a common interface
for all existing I/O implementations (serial, IrDA, bluetooth and USB
HID). With a common interface the dive computer backends can more easily
use different I/O implementations at runtime, without needing
significant code changes. For example bluetooth enabled devices can
easily switch between native bluetooth communication and serial port
emulation mode.
The new interface is modelled after the existing serial communication
api. Implementations where some of those functions are meaningless (e.g.
IrDA, bluetooth and USB), can just leave those functions unimplemented
(causing the call to fail with DC_STATUS_UNSUPPORTED), or implement it
as a no-op (always return DC_STATUS_SUCCESS).
The vendor_product_parser_create() and vendor_product_device_open()
functions should be called indirectly, through the generic
dc_device_open() and dc_parser_new() functions. And the
vendor_product_extract_dives() functions are internal functions that
should never have been part of the public api in the first place.
The Uwatec Meridian protocol is identical to the Uwatec Smart/Galileo
protocol, except for some additional framing around each data packet,
and the switch from IrDA to usb-serial communication. For parsing, the
data format appears to be identical to the Galileo data format.
Although the communication protocol of the OSTC3 is nearly identical to
that of the Frog, the different size parameters make it hard to share
the code easily. On top of that, if we ever implement native bluetooth
communication support, we'll need a completely separate backend anyway.
Therefore the Frog backend is simply duplicated, with a few OSTC3
specific changes applied here and there.
The existing ostc parser is upgraded to support the new OSTC3 data
format.
The Petrel (with updated firmware) supports an enhanced communication
protocol, which is more efficient and powerfull than the legacy Predator
compatibility mode. The new protocol uses data compression for faster
transfers and supports the ability to selectively download individual
dives. Last but not least, the new protocol isn't limited to the last
128kB of logbook data, but can access the full logbook capacity (16MB).
This is only a preliminary version. There is certainly some room for
improvement, but the basic functionality is already in place. That
should be sufficient for daily use, and possibles issues can always be
fixed when discovered.
With the introduction of a context object, library initialization and
shutdown can be performed without requiring any global state. A single
process can use multiple independent contexts without any problems. The
lack of a global state also improves the thread-safety of the library.
At the moment, the new context object is primary used to implement an
improved logging system.
As the name already indicates, a device descriptor is lightweight
object which describes a single device. Currently, the api supports
getting the device name (vendor and product) and model number. But
this can extended with other features when necessary.
The public header files are moved to a new subdirectory, to separate
the definition of the public interface from the actual implementation.
Using an identical directory layout as the final installation has the
advantage that the example code can be build outside the project tree
without any modifications to the #include statements.
