A complete build of akka-serial involves two parts
Building Scala sources (the front-end), resulting in a platform independent artifact (i.e. a jar file).
Building C sources (the back-end), yielding a native library that may only be used on systems resembling the platform for which it was compiled.
Both steps are independent, their only interaction being a header file generated by the JDK utility javah (see sbt javah for details), and may therefore be built in any order.
Run sbt core/package in the base directory. This simply compiles Scala sources as with any standard sbt project and packages the resulting class files into a jar.
The back-end is managed by CMake and all relevant files are contained in native/src.
Several steps are involved in producing the native library:
Bootstrap the build (run this once, if Makefile does not exist).
cmake .Compile
make.
Note: should you encounter an error about a missing “jni.h” file, try setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the base path of your JDK installation.Install
The native library is now ready and can be:
copied to a local directory: DESTDIR=$(pwd)/<directory> make install
installed system-wide: make install
put into a “fat” jar, useful for dependency management with sbt (see next section)
The native library produced in the previous step may be bundled into a “fat” jar so that it can be included in sbt projects through its regular dependency mechanisms. In this process, sbt basically acts as a wrapper script around CMake, calling the native build process and packaging generated libraries. Running sbt native/package produces the fat jar in native/target.
Note: an important feature of fat jars is to include native libraries for several platforms. To copy binaries compiled on other platforms to the fat jar, place them in a subfolder of native/lib_native. The subfolder should have the name $(arch)-$(kernel), where arch and kernel are, respectively, the lower-case values returned by uname -m and uname -s.
The project and package versions follow a semantic pattern: M.m.p, where
M is the major version, representing backwards incompatible changes to the public API
m is the minor version, indicating backwards compatible changes such as new feature additions
p is the patch number, representing internal modifications such as bug-fixes
Usually (following most Linux distribution’s conventions), shared libraries produced by a project name of version M.m.p are named libname.so.M.m.p. However, since when accessing shared libraries through the JVM, only the name can be specified and no particular version, the convention adopted by akka-serial is to append M to the library name and always keep the major version at zero. E.g. libakkaserial.so.3.1.2 becomes libakakserial3.so.0.1.2.
The samples directory contains fully functional application examples of akka-serial. To run an example, change to the base directory of akka-serial and run sbt samples
To be able connect you can use real device (arduino) burned with sample-echo (dev/arduino-terminal) code, or create Virtual Serial Port pair
socat (SOcket CAT) – multipurpose relay – is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them. socat is #4 on the Top 100 Network Security Tools list, available in most distro repositories (on Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt-get install socat does the trick), really light on resources, and very efficient.
To create a pair of VSP’s
socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 pty,raw,echo=0
you will get something like
socat[5894] N PTY is /dev/ttys002
socat[5894] N PTY is /dev/ttys003
socat[5894] N starting data transfer loop with FDs [5,5] and [7,7]
and that’s it! As long as the socat is running, you have a pair of VSP’s open (their names are printed by socat on initialization). See socat man page for more details on what the above command does.
Now You can connect to first socket ( in this case /dev/ttys002) using some sample (or Your code), and use second for monitoring or/and sending messages
To send - use command
echo 'Hello World' > /dev/ttys003
To listen - use command
cat < /dev/ttys003
Connecting executable and VSP
socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 "exec:myprog ...,pty,raw,echo=0"
where the executable myprog will be connected with the VSP through stdio.
For example Echo-server would look like
socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 "exec:/bin/cat,pty,raw,echo=0"
Releases are handled automatically by the continuous integration and deployment system, Travis CI. A release will be performed for every annotated Git tag that is pushed to the main repository.
Here are a couple of observations on the release process:
During a release, only readily available libraries in native/lib_native are packaged into the fat jar, no local native compilation is performed. The rationale behind this is that while native libraries rarely change, they are still tied to the version of libc of the compiling system. Since the releases are mostly done on a development machine with a cutting-edge OS, compiling native libraries locally could break compatibility with older systems.
The website is not automatically updated. After creating a new release:
sbt makeSite to generate documentation in target/site/git checkout gh-pagestarget/site/ to documentation/M.m/_config.yml with latest version