REDAC Firmware Manual

This documentation covers the C++ firmware for the hybrid controller (microcontroller on CTRL-block) of the Reconfigurable Discrete Analog Computer, in short REDAC as well as of its little brother LUCIDAC, made by anabrid GmbH.

Version of this document:

Build time:

Mar 07, 2025

Copyright:

© 2025 anabrid GmbH, Open Sourced as GPL and BSD, see licensing

The most up to date version of this document can be read online as web pages or printable PDF. This documentation is generated with Doxygen and Sphinx. You are currently viewing the main entry page of the documentation. In the Doxygen part of the documentation you can browse the actual code by namespace, by class name or by file/folder.

Developer Guide

• Introduction
• Connecting
  • USB Serial terminal connection
  • Neccessary udev rules on linux to connect Teensy via USB
  • Finding the USB device on Mac
• Flashing
  • How to flash a new (prebuilt) version of the firmware
  • Alternatives
  • Building a newer version of teensy_loarder_cli then included in PlatformIO
• Building
  • Working with PlatformIO
  • Environments
  • Linux-relevant hints for Teensy via USB
• Feature flags
  • Flags related to turning on/off networking features
  • Flags related to loading code
  • Flags related to shipping/vendoring
  • Flags related to debugging
• Testing
  • Limitations
• Debugging
  • Print-style debugging
  • Post mortems
  • Native debugging
  • Other approaches

Architecture

• Hybrid Controller architecture
  • Hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and Platform Library
  • Networking
  • The web stack
• REDAC entitiy concept
  • General idea of entities in REDAC
  • General idea of entities in LUCIDAC
  • Entity modeling
  • Firmware representation
  • Protocol implementation
  • Entitiy functions
• REDAC communication protocol
  • A short primer into the protocol
  • On synchronous and asynchronous messaging
  • Message types design principles
  • Protocol elevation
  • Connection endpoint URIs
• REDAC calibration process
  • General idea of calibrating the U-C-I path

Standalone Usage

• Networking
  • How to find the hybrid controller in the network
  • DHCP client vs Static IP address
  • Networking limitations
  • Changing the networking settings
  • The USB virtual serial terminal
• Permanent Settings
• IT Security aspects

Firmware API

• Communication
  • Messaging
  • Networking and Authentification
  • Web-Related
• Computation
  • Data Acquisition (DAQ)
  • Mode Managament
  • Run Managament
• Controller
  • Distributor
  • Nonvolatile configuration
  • Code Loaders
  • Utilities
• Low Level HAL
  • Digital Bus
  • Chip communication
  • Misc Digital IO
• Buisness Code
  • Blocks
  • Platform
  • Entity structure

Colophon

• Style Guide
  • Entrypoints and Seperations
  • Formatting
  • Communication Concepts
  • Strings
  • The Heap in general
  • Strings/Buffer vs. Streams
• Documentation
  • Hosted output
  • How to build the doxygen locally
  • How to build the Sphinx locally
• Wording
• Licensing
  • External libraries
  • External code snippets distributed with this code