The software detailed in this documentation was designed and implemented for the purposes of connecting a Carambola to the Firefly's (designed by Sidhant Gupta) microprocessor and a server hosted on a local network.

The client software consists of two main entities: the consumer and relay. Their purposes are as follows.

The consumer is a realtime process designed to handle all the communication with the Firefly's microprocessor. Its task is singular: to move any data available in the micro's data buffer to a larger buffer located on the Carambola. This buffer, described in buffer.h, is shared between the consumer and relay such that the relay may take data in that buffer and process it. Because of the memory constraints of the microprocessor, the consumer must always be able to read data in the micro's buffer at a consistent fast pace. For this reason, the consumer does little additional processing. In the case of the relay process dying, the consumer will handle restarting the relay and keeping the data safe on the large SD card storage medium.

The relay is a process tasked with moving any data available in either a) the shared buffer, or b) the SD card storage medium. The destination for this data will be a server located on the same local network as the Carambola. This is to ensure that network latency is minimal, so that a minimal amount of processor time will be used sending the data across the network.

@authors Larson, Patrick; Pickett, Cameron