| Nanopb - Protocol Buffers for Embedded Systems | |
| ============================================== | |
| [](https://travis-ci.org/nanopb/nanopb) | |
| Nanopb is a small code-size Protocol Buffers implementation in ansi C. It is | |
| especially suitable for use in microcontrollers, but fits any memory | |
| restricted system. | |
| * **Homepage:** http://kapsi.fi/~jpa/nanopb/ | |
| * **Documentation:** http://kapsi.fi/~jpa/nanopb/docs/ | |
| * **Downloads:** http://kapsi.fi/~jpa/nanopb/download/ | |
| * **Forum:** https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nanopb | |
| Using the nanopb library | |
| ------------------------ | |
| To use the nanopb library, you need to do two things: | |
| 1. Compile your .proto files for nanopb, using protoc. | |
| 2. Include pb_encode.c and pb_decode.c in your project. | |
| The easiest way to get started is to study the project in "examples/simple". | |
| It contains a Makefile, which should work directly under most Linux systems. | |
| However, for any other kind of build system, see the manual steps in | |
| README.txt in that folder. | |
| Using the Protocol Buffers compiler (protoc) | |
| -------------------------------------------- | |
| The nanopb generator is implemented as a plugin for the Google's own protoc | |
| compiler. This has the advantage that there is no need to reimplement the | |
| basic parsing of .proto files. However, it does mean that you need the | |
| Google's protobuf library in order to run the generator. | |
| If you have downloaded a binary package for nanopb (either Windows, Linux or | |
| Mac OS X version), the 'protoc' binary is included in the 'generator-bin' | |
| folder. In this case, you are ready to go. Simply run this command: | |
| generator-bin/protoc --nanopb_out=. myprotocol.proto | |
| However, if you are using a git checkout or a plain source distribution, you | |
| need to provide your own version of protoc and the Google's protobuf library. | |
| On Linux, the necessary packages are protobuf-compiler and python-protobuf. | |
| On Windows, you can either build Google's protobuf library from source or use | |
| one of the binary distributions of it. In either case, if you use a separate | |
| protoc, you need to manually give the path to nanopb generator: | |
| protoc --plugin=protoc-gen-nanopb=nanopb/generator/protoc-gen-nanopb ... | |
| Running the tests | |
| ----------------- | |
| If you want to perform further development of the nanopb core, or to verify | |
| its functionality using your compiler and platform, you'll want to run the | |
| test suite. The build rules for the test suite are implemented using Scons, | |
| so you need to have that installed. To run the tests: | |
| cd tests | |
| scons | |
| This will show the progress of various test cases. If the output does not | |
| end in an error, the test cases were successful. | |
| Note: Mac OS X by default aliases 'clang' as 'gcc', while not actually | |
| supporting the same command line options as gcc does. To run tests on | |
| Mac OS X, use: "scons CC=clang CXX=clang". Same way can be used to run | |
| tests with different compilers on any platform. |