Application Program Interface for an Embedded Linux System

With the advance of electronics and its ever growing miniaturization, embedded systems are more prominent than ever. They have long made their way from industrial applications into the consumer market, being contained in anything from cellular phones to automobiles. Their power has grown substantially, too. Today’s embedded systems easily outperform a desktop PC twenty years ago. However, their new complexity calls for a new design approach in turn: one that emphasizes high-level tools and hardware/software trade offs rather than low-level programming and logic design. Modularity and abstraction layers gain an important role. Development is simplified and sped up if the same concepts apply. Additionally, code can be used for multiple products, lowering the development costs significantly. The goal of this project was the partial implementation of an interface. It will be used in programming applications for a specific embedded system: The RoBIOS library of the EyeBot M6 robotics platform. The main purpose of such an API is to make the programs written for it independent of the layers below. This way they can remain essentially unchanged even if the hardware or the operating system is modified. The RoBIOS API and its implementation exist already and are successfully applied, however only for the predecessors of the EyeBot M6. These systems only share their purpose, the hardware and software are fundamentally different. Therefore the implementation had to be created from scratch while the interface was essentially unchanged. Emphasis lay on routines for the user input section and the sound section of the RoBIOS library. Display routines were developed in accompanying project by a fellow student. These basic library segments allowed the creation of an application that serves as the main user interface for the robot and illustrates the functionality of the API, also being part of this project.