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libRBR

Preface

libRBR is a project I undertook while employed by RBR. It's a C library for communicating with their products, which are high-resolution data loggers for use in physical oceanography. As is described below, the library's interface mirrors the text-based command language exposed by the instruments.

This repository is a snapshot of the library as it existed when I stopped working on it. As the commit history indicates, I was the sole developer on the project up to this point. I did, of course, decide upon design principles in collaboration with my colleagues, as well as receive input and support from them, but the implementation in its entirety – the core library, testing, and documentation – were all my effort, and I'm proud of the result.

Introduction

libRBR provides an interface for simplified communication with RBR instruments. The library isolates the user from the low-level details of instrument communication by wrapping each instrument command in a function with fully typed arguments. Familiarity with the instrument command set is still required in order to know which commands to send, but the library handles the intricacies of waking the instrument, response parsing, etc.

For example:

RBRInstrumentSampling sampling;
RBRInstrument_getSampling(instrument, &sampling);
printf("The instrument is performing %s sampling every %" PRIi32 "ms.\n",
       RBRInstrumentSamplingMode_name(sampling.mode),
       sampling.period);

The library also offers basic parsing for EasyParse sample data and events.

The library tries to be platform-agnostic. It targets C99 and should be compilable on any compliant compiler.

If you happen to have stumbled across this file in a source tree somewhere, you might be interested to know that this project is maintained on Bitbucket.

Support

The library is intended to support the following firmware types and versions. The library should have good forwards compatibility as breaking changes between firmware versions are rare and made only when absolutely necessary.

Firmware Type Generation Version
103 (Logger2, standard) Early 2015 v1.440
104 (Logger3, standard) Late 2017 v1.102

Building

The library can be built with GNU Make. For documentation on Make targets, see the Makefile.

Library compilation requires a C99-compliant C compiler; The library makes a few assumptions about its host platform. For details, see the documentation on porting.

API document compilation requires Doxygen.

In most cases, the library can be built in a few steps. First, check out the code with Git:

git clone https://bitbucket.org/rbr/librbr.git
cd librbr

Then use make(1) to build the library:

# Build just the library.
make lib
# Build and execute tests. Also builds the library if necessary.
make tests
# Build Doxygen documentation.
make docs
# Does all of the above.
make

Platform-specific instructions and advice are available:

Using

See the introduction for an overview of library conventions.

API documentation is built into the docs/ subdirectory. Prebuilt API documentation corresponding to the latest release is available at https://docs.rbr-global.com/librbr/.

For examples, please see the examples/ subdirectory.

You may prefer to integrate the entire library source into your codebase rather than link against the library. In that case, we strongly suggest doing so via a Git submodule where possible to make updating easier.

Contributing

The library is primarily maintained by RBR and development is directed by our needs and the needs of our OEM customers. However, we're happy to take contributions generally.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0; see https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

  • The license is not “viral”. You can include it either as source or by linking against it, statically or dynamically, without affecting the licensing of your own code.
  • You do not need to include RBR's copyright notice in your documentation, nor do you need to display it at program runtime. You must retain RBR's copyright notice in library source files.
  • You are under no legal obligation to share your own modifications (although we would appreciate it if you did so).
  • If you make changes to the source, in addition to retaining RBR's copyright notice, you must add a notice stating that you changed it. You may add your own copyright notices.