The Aeris 500AI serial number appears to be located at a slightly
different offset, and with an unusual encoding. It's a BCD encoded
number, but with the digits of each byte swapped.
At the moment, the encoding of the serial number is tied to the global
pointer mode. To support devices where this is no longer the case, a new
entry for the serial number encoding is added.
The Aeris 500AI is quite different from the other vtpro compatible
models. First, it uses the INTR protocol variant. Next, it doesn't
appear to have a logbook ringbuffer. Instead it supports a new read
logbook index command (0x52) that returns the logbook entries. This
requires a custom implementation of the logbook function.
There are two variants of the vtpro communication protocol: the existing
MOD variant and the new INTR variant. The main difference is in the
initialization sequence, with two completely different response packets:
MOD--OK_V2.00
INTR-OK_V1.11
The INTR variant does not appear to return useful information in the
version packet.
By adding the logbook and profile functions to the vtable, a dive
computer backend can now easily replace the default implementation with
a custom one, without having to duplicate the common code.
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 hardcoded version strings are now grouped into arrays, according to
their corresponding layout descriptor. The main advantage of using
arrays is that new versions strings can now easily be added, without
having to modify any code.
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.
A helper function is added to simplify implementing the devic_dump()
function on top of the device_read() function, and enable progress
events automatically.
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.
The logbook ringbuffer is now considered empty if any of the pointers is
outside the valid ringbuffer area. Compared to checking only against a
special empty value, this approach makes the code more robust against
invalid pointers.
Although calibration is optional, it's highly recommended because it
reduces the transfer time considerably. The calibrate function is
removed from the public api.
