The UPM repository provides software drivers for a wide variety of commonly used sensors and actuators. These software drivers interact with the underlying hardware platform (or microcontroller), as well as with the attached sensors, through calls to MRAA APIs.

Programmers can access the interfaces for each sensor by including the sensor’s corresponding header file and instantiating the associated sensor class. In the typical use case, a constructor initializes the sensor based on parameters that identify the sensor, the I/O protocol used and the pin location of the sensor.

C++ interfaces have been defined for the following sensor/actuator types, but they are subject to change:

• Light controller
• Light sensor
• Temperature sensor
• Humidity sensor
• Pressure sensor
• Gas sensor
• Analog to digital converter

The developer community is encouraged to help expand the list of supported sensors and actuators and provide feedback on interface design.

A sensor/actuator is expected to work as such (here is the MMA7660 accelerometer API):

  // Instantiate an MMA7660 on I2C bus 0
  upm::MMA7660 *accel = new upm::MMA7660(MMA7660_I2C_BUS,
                                         MMA7660_DEFAULT_I2C_ADDR);

  // place device in standby mode so we can write registers
  accel->setModeStandby();

  // enable 64 samples per second
  accel->setSampleRate(upm::MMA7660::AUTOSLEEP_64);
  
  // place device into active mode
  accel->setModeActive();

  while (shouldRun)
    {
      int x, y, z;
      
      accel->getRawValues(&x, &y, &z);
      cout << "Raw values: x = " << x 
           << " y = " << y
           << " z = " << z
           << endl;
      
      float ax, ay, az;
      
      accel->getAcceleration(&ax, &ay, &az);
      cout << "Acceleration: x = " << ax 
           << "g y = " << ay
           << "g z = " << az
           << "g" << endl;
      
      usleep(500000);
    }

Browse through the list of all examples.

Multi-sensor samples for the starter and specialized kits can be found in the iot-devkit-samples repository.

Supported sensor list from API documentation.

You can also refer to the Intel® IoT Developer Zone.

If you would like to create projects and run the UPM samples using an Intel recommended IDE, please refer to the Intel Developer Zone IDE page.

Find notes on how to install UPM on various OS'es on this page.

See building documentation here.

A quick way to add a new sensor driver is to port existing code from another platform (e.g. Arduino) and swap the IO calls to the MRAA API. This of course assumes either ownership of the original code or licensing that allows unrestricted redistribution.

The porting section has more information on this process, and there is an example available based on the max31855 sensor.

Read more on creating Java bindings for your new driver.

Before you begin development, take a look at our naming conventions. The name you pick for a newly added sensor needs to be unique in the UPM library.

Then, please go over this short set of rules for new contributions. Make sure you add yourself as an author on every new code file submitted. If you are providing a fix with significant changes, feel free to add yourself as a contributor. Signing-off your commits is mandatory.

Documenting your code is also a big part of the task. We have a strict set of tags used to classify our sensors and their capabilities. You can find out more about this in our section on documenting a sensor API. Finally, if you really want to ensure consistency with the rest of the library, and the intel-iot-devkit repositories in general, take a look at our extensive author guide.

Even if we try our best not to, every once in a while we are forced to modify our API in a way that will break backwards compatibility. If you find yourself unable to compile code that was working fine before a library update, make sure you check the API changes section first.

NOTE - Our C++ header files changed extension from .h to .hpp!

Version changelog here.

List of known limitations here.