When an Uwatec Aladin is connected, but the transfer hasn't been started
yet, we receive a continuous stream of zero bytes. Approximately every
7-8ms a new zero byte is received. But when the dive computer is
(temporary) disconnected, the stream of zero bytes also ends.
The consequence is that due to the use of blocking read call with an
infinite timeout, the application becomes unresponsive, without any
chance to abort the communication. This can eaily be avoided by using a
timeout instead. Receiving the main 2048 byte packet takes about 1050ms.
Thus a 3000ms timeout should be long enough to not cause the main data
transfer to timeout, but still short enough to cancel reasonable fast.
The for loop construct without an increment statement is a bit unusual
and thus easy to miss. With an equivalent while loop, the intent becomes
a bit more obvious.
Currently the dive computer backends are responsible for opening (and
closing) the underlying I/O stream internally. The consequence is that
each backend is hardwired to a specific transport type (e.g. serial,
irda or usbhid). In order to remove this dependency and support more
than one transport type in the same backend, the opening (and closing)
of the I/O stream is moved to the application.
The dc_device_open() function is modified to accept a pointer to the I/O
stream, instead of a string with the device node (which only makes sense
for serial communication). The dive computer backends only depend on the
common I/O interface.
Being able to synchronize the dive computer clock with the host system
is a very useful feature. Add the infrastructure to support this feature
through the public api.
After being removed from the public api, these functions can be changed
into local, static functions. And in a few cases, they are no longer
necessary and can be removed completely.
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 low level serial and IrDA functions are modified to:
- Use the libdivecomputer namespace prefix.
- Return a more detailed status code instead of the zero on success and
negative on error return value. This will allow to return more
fine-grained error codes.
- The read and write functions have an additional output parameter to
return the actual number of bytes transferred. Since these functions
are not atomic, some data might still be transferred successfully if
an error occurs.
The dive computer backends are updated to use the new api.
Both the allocation and initialization of the object data structure is
now moved to a single function. The corresponding deallocation function
is intended to free objects that have been allocated, but are not fully
initialized yet. The public cleanup function shouldn't be used in such
case, because it may try to release resources that haven't been
initialized yet.
Instead of freeing the object data structure in the backend specific
cleanup function, the memory is now freed automatically in the base
class function. This reduces the amount of boilerplate code in the
backends. Backends that don't allocate any additional resources, do no
longer require a cleanup function at all.
When the close function returns, all resources should be freed,
regardless of whether an error has occured or not. The error code is
purely informative.
However, in order to return the first error code, which is usually the
most interesting one, the current implementation is unnecessary
complicated. If an error occurs, there is no need to exit immediately.
Simply store the error code unless there is already a previous one, and
then continue.
Currently, each backend has it's own function to verify whether the
object vtable pointer is the expected one. All these functions can be
removed in favor of a single isintance function in the base class,
which takes the expected vtable pointer as a parameter.
Functions which are called through the vtable, don't need to verify the
vtable pointer, and those checks are removed.
The term "backend" can be confusing because it can refer to both the
virtual function table and the device/parser backends. The use of the
term "vtable" avoids this.
The version function requires device specific knowledge to use it (at
least the required buffer size), it is already called internally when
necessary, and only a few backends support it. Thus there is no good
reason to keep it in the high-level public api.
These macros are used internally and don't need to be exposed. In some
cases, the actual values are not even constant, but dependant on the
model and/or the firmware version.
I forgot to update the device and parser initialization functions to
store the context pointer into the objects. As a result, the internal
context pointers were always NULL.
The public api is changed to require a context object for all
operations. Because other library objects store the context pointer
internally, only the constructor functions need an explicit context
object as a parameter.
Adding the "dc_" namespace prefix (which is of course an abbreviation
for libdivecomputer) should avoid conflicts with other libraries. For
the time being, only the high-level device and parser layers are
changed.
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.
To be able to cancel an operation, an application should register a
callback function that returns a non-zero value whenever the active
operaton should be cancelled. A backend can invoke this callback function
to query the application for a pending cancellation request.
In a ringbuffer implementation with only two begin/end pointers, it's
impossible to distinguish between an empty and a full ringbuffer. The
correct interpretation mode needs to be specified by the user.
Using a resizable memory buffer allows to allocate the right amount of
memory inside the backend, avoiding having to know the required buffer
size in advance.
Moved the initialization of the backend pointers to the beginning of the
source file. Without the need for a tentative definition, the library
can be compiled with a C++ compiler.
