Mocking capability allows libmraa user to work with the library without any real hardware available. Enabling this requires library recompilation with architecture override (see Building section below). When mock is enabled, library simulates actual HW operations at the backend so that for the application it looks like a usual board. Being implemented at the backend, the functionality is available in all language bindings libmraa supports.
This feature is yet in the experimental mode and not all functionality is available. Right now we simulate a single generic board with:
- GPIO (without ISR)
- ADC with 10 (std)/12 (max) bit resolution, which returns random values on read
- Single I2C bus with one device at address 0x33 and 10 bytes of register space,
which can be read or written in bytes or words (big-endian). Technically those
registers are just an array of
uint8_t
, so you can treat them as 10 single-byte registers or 5 single-word ones or a mix thereof. - Single SPI bus with one Chip Select. All write functions are supported, received
data items (words or bytes) are calculated from the sent ones using
sent_byte (or word) XOR constant
formula. See SPI mock header for constant values. - Single UART port. All functions are supported, but many are simple stubs. Write
always succeeds, read returns 'Z' symbol as many times as
read()
requested.
We plan to develop it further and all contributions are more than welcome.
See the table below for pin layout and features
MRAA Number | Pin Name | Notes |
---|---|---|
0 | GPIO0 | GPIO pin, no muxing, no ISR |
1 | ADC0 | AIO pin, returns random value on read |
2 | I2C0SDA | SDA pin for I2C0 bus |
3 | I2C0SCL | SCL pin for I2C0 bus |
4 | SPI0CS | CS pin for SPI0 bus |
5 | SPI0MOSI | MOSI pin for SPI0 bus |
6 | SPI0MISO | MISO pin for SPI0 bus |
7 | SPI0SCLK | SCLK pin for SPI0 bus |
8 | UART0RX | RX pin for UART0 port |
9 | UART0TX | TX pin for UART0 port |
Generally all the building steps are the same as listed in the main building guide, you just need to set some specific CMake options.
To build under Linux, follow standard instructions, just make sure to set
the -DBUILDARCH="MOCK"
CMake option.
Mocking capability allows us to build and use libmraa under Windows. That helps if you e.g. don't want to leave your customary Windows-based Python IDE, but want to develop libmraa-based programs.
Building Node.js bindings was not yet tested under Windows as MSYS2 does not have a ready-made package. Java was not tested either.
You'll need the following to build libmraa under Windows:
-
MSYS2 basic installation
-
Several additional packages, install them by running
pacman -S cmake base-devel gcc git
The procedure is conceptually the same as under Linux - you first need to run CMake with specific options to generate makefiles and then run make to build everything.
-
Run MSYS2 shell (not a MinGW one)
-
Clone the libmraa git repo (let's assume into
/home/test/mraa/mraa-src
dir) -
Create a build directory outside of the clone one (let's say
/home/test/mraa/mraa-build
) -
Run CMake, switching off unsupported options and enabling mock platform:
cmake ../mraa-src/ -DBUILDARCH="MOCK" -DBUILDSWIGNODE=OFF -DENABLEEXAMPLES=OFF
-
Make, install and test:
make clean && make install && make test
All tests should pass.
Note: To have autocompletion in Python IDE, just point it to MSYS2's Python
and make sure to specify any additional paths pointing to site-packages dir
with mraa module if IDE requires that ("Interpreter Paths" in PyCharm).
With the above settings the module will be installed into /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages
and the libmraa itself - into /usr/local/bin
.