Physical
Physical is a library for interacting with the physical world from a computer. This can broadly be broken down into two categories:
- Collecting and digitizing data from the physical world.
- Controlling devices that take physical action.
Concepts
The main concepts of Physical are:
- Peripheral: A peripheral is a board that hosts physical I/O and usually does analog to digital conversion or digital to analog conversion. A peripheral cannot function on its own, it must be connected to a node. This is more narrow than the definition of a peripheral in embedded systems generally. Peripheral support is focused on complete boards, not individual components like an ADC. Although common abstractions for components specific to physical can be provided in this repository, general component abstractions / drivers should be made separately, such as in BFPOWER drivers.
- Node: A node hosts peripherals. A node can have a commander but does not need one. A node can ignore or even override commands from the commander. In a complex system, nodes are intended to be kept simple, less likely to encounter an error than the commander, and in some cases should check for obvious problems in commands from the commander. Node can also communicate with other nodes.
- Commander: A commander hosts nodes. It performs long running computations and directs nodes based on the results.