argali

Copyright (c) 2021 Josh Myer [email protected]

CC0 v1.0

Argali is an STM32-based product development template. That is, it's meant to be a starting point for products, not just projects. This is a bit of a new concept in the open source space, so it's worth expanding on it a bit.

Projects, Products, and Companies

Someone much more clever than me once outlined how he assesses the scale of a new invention/idea: "Is this a project, a product, or a company?" This is a very insightful question, as it helps define the scope of what you're up to.

Projects are one-offs, with a resulting item or report. They habe a closed-ended time span to them, and don't involve ongoing support or development longer term. Projects are mostly R&D, art pieces, or one-off hacks (ie: art pieces for nerds).

Products start as projects, but they wind up "living on," as it were. All things that are up for sale in quantity are, obviously enough, in this category. Less obviously, so are pieces of infrastructure. This is part of what made Amazon's AWS possible: in a large enough organization, any piece of infrastructure is its own product.

Companies are usually built around a single initial product. However, that product usually needs to show potential for growth and expansion. The initial potential is provided by the fact that nobody has one yet: this alone can allow a single compelling product to go from zero to a million users. But usually you need a product that can be riffed on, and used to serve multiple markets.

Argali is for products

For any embedded thing that is "project" scale, it's hard to beat Arduino. You can very quickly slap something together and see if it's possible. From there, though, it's not easy to get to a sustainable product. This often leads to an overgrown prototype, which isn't easy to get into production as a product. I speak from some experience here, as I've been brought in as a consultant on multiple of these.

Argali is a template to make STM32 projects easy to start cleanly, with a pathway to becoming a sustained product. It's intended for greenfield work at the moment, so we can make some strong assumptions:

• C only, no C++ support (yet?)
• A clean separation between logic code and hardware code
• Source code will be in code/src/foo.c
• Unit test code will be in code/src/test_foo
• Drivers go in code/src/target/devboard_v2/peripheral.c
• There's a unified development environment that all developers will build in (Docker image with make and gcc), but developers are free to actually code however they want
• Everything runs in a Linux docker container, simplifying scripts. Currently, argali is only being developed on Linux, so the infrastructure outside of docker is a bit Linux-centric. PRs to support OS X and Windows as first-class docker hosts would be very welcome. Until then, this should all run fine in a Linux VM, with the repo living on a shared mountpoint so you can edit in your OS of choice.

License

Argali is released under the CC0 Licence v1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

That said, I would love to hear if you're using it, and a gallery of applications might help in getting more people to build reproducible products in Open Source.

Features

• Builds libopencm3 code out of the box (For the F767ZI Nucleo board)
• Runs everything inside a docker container, so versions can be well-controlled
• Can run unit tests in Linux on the docker container (using the Unity test framework)

Docker niceties

The docker container runs as your userid, so you won't wind up with lots of files owned by root:root that you need to constantly chmod.

In code/, there is docker_shell.sh. Running this will give you a bash shell inside the container. The main purpose of this is troubleshooting, since it's likely that you'll wind up needing to bolt on a lot of your own stuff. The other big use for this is running your Linux-side unit tests under gdb.

The docker shell also sets a custom ${HISTFILE} variable, which means that you actually get a bash history inside your docker containers that can persist across sessions.

Code of Conduct

argali uses the "Contributor Covenant" code of conduct (currently version 1.3.0).

Please review [CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md](Code of Conduct) before submitting PRs or diffs to the repository.