Last week, SoftwareAG held a cross-company innovation event, where engineers from across the globe came together to create cool new systems and technologies. For one team in Apama, that of course meant playing around with RaspberryPi devices. Community members might recall our previous internal hackathon which produced an EPL plug-in for interfacing Apama with the on board GPIO system, and we are happy to report that this project has made a lot of progress in the past few days. We wanted this plugin to be ready for both public use and development; as such we’ve taken care to make both as quick and easy as possible for community members. So what exactly has changed? Let’s find out!
New Functionality
Leveraging the wiringPi library already in use, the plugin now boasts both software emulated PWM and the ability to interact with SPI based devices. Additionally, after integrating with an existing C++ wrapper for RTIMULib, we can now also communicate with senseHAT devices. There’s still plenty of room for contribution, especially in the very much under construction sense-hat-cpp library, so please feel free to get involved.
Testing
Using our favourite testing framework PySys, we have created a series of tests for checking both the basic functionality of the plugins, as well as more involved cases involving helper EPL and even a few samples/tutorials of complex systems. Where possible, these tests run without the need to set up external hardware, circuits and the like, nor manual input from the user; merely run the test and see the result! We hope that this will make future development a pain free and expedient process.
We are also investigating a continuous integration solution for integration into the GitHub repo – however the infrastructure challenges for this effort are somewhat tricky. Please stay tuned for further details.
Next Steps
After a bit of tidying up, we’d like to extend our current offering of helper EPL. This will mean that users can easily get started with a range of components with a minimum of amount of work – less coding but more results!
All the projects mentioned are completely open for contribution; we hope that the more active community members can find something they are interested in. As always, please feel free to leave a comment or post on the forum!
– The Apama Community Team