zrna - software-defined analog

Protobuf definition and API clients for the Zrna software-defined analog platform.

See zrna.org/docs for the full documentation.

Order hardware.

The Protobuf Spec

The proto directory contains the protobuf definition and also serves as the root output directory for generated sources. Issuing make from the root directory will compile everything and generate code with the protoc compiler. The assumption is that protoc is available on your PATH and also that Golang source generation is available (this requires setup beyond the default protoc installation. See https://github.com/golang/protobuf. If you are interested in particular languages, simply disable the ones you don't need in the Makefile.

By default, the build process generates bindings for Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, Golang and plain C via Nanopb. The generated sources for each of these end up in the following directories:

proto/python
proto/cpp
proto/java
proto/js
proto/golang
proto/nanopb

Zrna hardware uses the nanopb binding natively which is usually the best choice for constrained embedded environments. As is normally the case with protobuf though, a common binary wire format is generated regardless of what language binding is used, i.e. your client is free to use any of the language bindings. If this is your first time working with protobuf, it's worth it to review the docs: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/.

The Python Client

The zrna directory contains the sources for the Python API client that is available on PyPI as zrna. It's built on the Python bindings generated in the previous step. See the quickstart guide for more information about how to use it. See the demo applications for usage examples.