Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By : Igor Viarheichyk
Book Image

Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

By: Igor Viarheichyk

Overview of this book

Developing applications for embedded systems may seem like a daunting task as developers face challenges related to limited memory, high power consumption, and maintaining real-time responses. This book is a collection of practical examples to explain how to develop applications for embedded boards and overcome the challenges that you may encounter while developing. The book will start with an introduction to embedded systems and how to set up the development environment. By teaching you to build your first embedded application, the book will help you progress from the basics to more complex concepts, such as debugging, logging, and profiling. Moving ahead, you will learn how to use specialized memory and custom allocators. From here, you will delve into recipes that will teach you how to work with the C++ memory model, atomic variables, and synchronization. The book will then take you through recipes on inter-process communication, data serialization, and timers. Finally, you will cover topics such as error handling and guidelines for real-time systems and safety-critical systems. By the end of this book, you will have become proficient in building robust and secure embedded applications with C++.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Using libgpiod to control GPIO pins

In the preceding recipe, we learned how to access the RTC using the ioctl API. Can we use it to control GPIO pins as well? The answer is yes. Recently, a generic GPIO driver was added to Linux, along with a user-space library, libgpiod, to simplify access to devices connected to GPIO by adding a convenience layer on top of the generic ioctl API. This interface allows embedded developers to manage their devices on any Linux-based platform without writing device drivers. Additionally, it provides bindings for C++ out of the box.

As a result, the wiringPi library has been deprecated, despite still being widely used because of its easy-to-use interface.

In this recipe, we will learn how to use the libgpiod C++ bindings. We are going to use the same LED blinking example to see the differences and similarities in the wiringPi and libgpiod...