Compiling a Custom Driver

Owned by Nina Cardillo
Last updated: 26-Jun-2023 by Rich Blomseth
3 min read

You can create a custom driver for the SmartServer to provide support for additional protocols not built into the standard SmartServer software.  To develop a custom driver you implement your driver-specific code in C++ using the GNU C++ compiler (g++) and link your driver with the IAP Driver Library (IDL) that is included with the SmartServer.  IDL is implemented as a shared object (.SO) written in C++, as is the associated header file, libidl.h.  The SmartServer includes an installed instance of GCC (GNU Compiler Collections) and the g++ compiler.  Using a console application like PuTTY to access the SmartServer, you can verify the installation of g++ by checking the version using the ‘g++ --version’ command from the console. 



The provided example custom driver includes a simple makefile.  Using the makefile is the easiest way to compile this example driver.  Using a console application, navigate to the /var/apollo/data/example/ directory and enter ‘make’ to compile the example.



The make file specifies the –g option with g++ in order to include the debugging information in the resulting object / executable file.  You can exclude this option for a final driver build.  Several library files must also be specified in the compilation process including:

  • idl – The required IDL library.
  • mosquitto – The MQTT message broker library.
  • pthread – The POSIX threading library (if custom driver threads are instantiated).
  • rt – The Linux real-time library.  This is required as the IDL library itself uses message queuing (mqueue).

After compiling the application, the resulting executable ( /.example ) is in the /var/apollo/data/example/ directory.

While this documentation section is focused on the basics associated with compiling the provided example custom driver on a SmartServer, you can also develop and compile on a different computer such as a Windows-based computer.  Running an custom driver on a non-Linux target other than that SmartServer may not be practical, given the close connection between a custom driver and the underlying hardware and the SmartServer CMS, but development environments like Visual Studio Code can facilitate code development.  Following are a few useful tools for developing a custom driver on a Windows host.

The Microsoft C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code enables cross-platform C and C++ development on Windows and Linux.  This extension can be easily downloaded & installed from within Visual Studio Code.



Mingw-w64 is an open source project and a free runtime environment created to support the GCC compiler (g++) on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows-based systems.  Mingw-w64 can be freely downloaded and installed from the SourceForge website.



During installation, set the architecture to x86_64 and add the path to your Mingw-w64 folder to the Windows PATH environment variable.  You can verify the minGW installation using a Windows console to check the installed version of g++ ‘g++ --version’.

Within Visual Studio Code you can ‘Configure Default Build Task’ from the Terminal and choose g++.exe as the active build file which will create an associated tasks.json file in the .vscode folder.  This ultimately provides a means to build custom driver code via the ‘Run Build Task’ from the Terminal in Visual Studio Code.