PropellerManager works by acting as a signal router between PropellerSession and PropellerDevice instances, and prevents these classes from interacting with each other directly.
Sessions can communicate with any available device without needing to manually open and close ports. Many sessions can be connected to a single device at a time. However, sessions may also request exclusive access to a device to complete a long-running or time-critical operation.
The PropellerManager API consists of six main classes:
PropellerManager handles device and platform issues transparently, allowing you to deploy a Propeller application in just a few lines of code.
Here is an example of how quickly a loader application can be written.
Opening and closing devices
PropellerManager handles device opening and closing by maintaining a count of sessions connected to each device. As long as the session count is greater than zero, a device will remain open.
When no PropellerSessions are registered in PropellerManager, all devices are released to the operating system.
Use of devices by multiple sessions
Sessions can communicate with any available device without the need to open and close ports or handle device errors. Many sessions can be connected to a single device at a time.
This configuration allows multiple widgets to consume device output and do interesting things with it, or can be used to simplify the creation of interactive GUI applets.
Exclusive use
The PropellerSession::reserve() and PropellerSession::release() functions control are responsible for reserving devices for exclusive use. When a session requests exclusive access, all other sessions are notified and paused temporarily.
PropellerLoader, being a time-critical application, wants to be the only user when sending an image with PropellerLoader::upload(), so it will reserve the port and release it at the end of the download.
Upon releasing the device, all other attached devices will be able to resume sending data.
Read buffering
Each PropellerSession has its own copy of the device's read buffer for its own personal usage. Because of this, session applications should be developed as though they are the only
