Psyclone SDK for Cygwin (under Windows)

What is the Psyclone SDK?

The Psyclone SDK is the Software Development Kit for creating internal Psyclone modules.

All internal modules have to be fully specified in the psySpec configuration file including in which third-party libraries to find their central crank function which is run as an internal process inside Psyclone. The specification includes information about which Whiteboards to subscribe to, which additional messages to retrieve when woken up by a trigger message, which parameters the crank function will be given and where to post the output.

The Psyclone SDK will enable you to create these crank functions which are run by the internal modules. A crank function is very simply a normal C function is an external library (a dll in Windows terms or shared object in UNIX terms) which is called from within the Psyclone executable and executed as if it resided inside. It is passed a Messenger object with which it can communicate with the internal module about new wakeup messages being received from a Whiteboard because of a subscription as well as sending any output message, if any. The Messenger object is also used for information about the module's parameters and even binary streams - more information about this can be found in the Psyclone Manual.

 

How do I unpack the SDK?

Cygwin for Windows is almost identical with most flavours of UNIX, such as Linux and BSD.

The Psyclone SDK is downloaded inside a tar archive. Before you can use it you need to unpack it and the supporting files. To do so you need to be in the directory where you downloaded the Psyclone SDK to. In here you enter the following command on the command line

      tar xvfz psyclonesdk[version]ncl.cygwin.tgz     

where version is the Psyclone SDK version, such as 0.5.0.0. This will create a directory with the name

      psyclonesdk[version]ncl.cygwin

inside which you will find the SDK files and examples.

 

How do I run the SDK?

To compile the examples you merely enter the following command on the command line

      make

This will compile and build the library file

      cm.dll

To include crank functions as part of an external library when running Psyclone you will need to create a psySpec and define a module using the specific crank function as a crank. For example, to define a module which uses the crank function testCrank located inside the example library called cm, you would specify the module like this

    <module name="MyModule">
        <description>This module is my first module</description>
        <parameter name="maxcount" type="Integer" value="100"/>
        <parameter name="anotherparam" type="double" value="0.01"/>
        <parameter name="astringparam" type="String" value="Hello"/>
        <spec>
            <context name="Psyclone.System.Ready">
                <phase id="1">
                    <triggers from="WB1">
                        <trigger after="100" type="Psyclone.System.Ready"/>
                        <trigger type="Test.Message.Type"/>
                    </triggers>
                    <cranks>
                        <crank name="cm::testCrank" />
                    </cranks>
                    <posts>
                        <post to="WB1" type="Other.Message.Type" />
                    </posts>
                </phase>
            </context>
        </spec>
    </module>

For more information on this, see the Psyclone Manual (psycloneManual.html).