electricui-embedded VS Protobuf

We have an MIT licensed protocol and Arduino library that makes it really easy to transfer data to the UI, and components for real-time line or scatter plots.

It includes an MIT licensed binary protocol that handles framing, checksums and multiple messageIDs. Standard C types are zero-configuration, just send them from hardware and the UI knows how to decode it. You can mark variables with some macros and get read/write capability in very little code. Assuming you're communicating over usb-serial, it should be very easy to get started. Here's the 'Arduino blinking led' firmware as an example.

We have an MIT licensed protocol and Arduino library, which provides framing, checksums, multiple messageIDs, query / set / call function behaviour, type information, ack packets, 1kB payload sizes by default and offset packets for sending larger data. There's a write up of the protocol here. I'm unsure how you've developed your stand alone program, but if you implement the 'host' side of the protocol, the Arduino library will take care of everything else.

If it's just the protocol you want, we have an open source, MIT licensed protocol available on GitHub. It comes with an Arduino library that you can install in a couple of clicks.

As a continuation of my other comment, Electric UI's binary protocol makes sending different data at different intervals pretty trivial. It's intended for serial comms, but of course can be sent over ethernet just as well.

It has an MIT licensed binary protocol that handles framing and checksums which works well over serial. There are several Arduino firmware examples in that repo.

While it is transport and protocol agnostic, it comes with a 'batteries included' binary protocol for serial comms to get up and running quickly. The protocol handles framing, multiple message IDs, acks and checksums.

It's because they changed the versioning format: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases?page=5

But I suppose old version still receive bugfixes.

For at least 4 years protobuf has had decent support for self-describing messages (very similar to avro) as well as reflection

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

Xgooglers trying to make do on the cheap will just create a Union of all their messages and include the message def in a self-describing message pattern. Super-sensitive network I/O can elide the message def (empty buffer) and any for RecordIO clone well file compression takes care of the definition.

Definitely useful to be able to dig out old defs but protobuf maintainers have surprisingly added useful features so you don’t have to.

Bonus points tho for extracting the protobuf defs that e.g. Apple bakes into their binaries.

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.

Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.

> didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages

The fact that protobufs are not self-delimiting is an endless source of frustration, but I know of 2 standards:

- SerializeDelimited* is part of the protobuf library: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

- Riegeli is "a file format for storing a sequence of string records, typically serialized protocol buffers. It supports dense compression, fast decoding, seeking, detection and optional skipping of data corruption, filtering of proto message fields for even faster decoding, and parallel encoding": https://github.com/google/riegeli

It looks like it is in fact universal. Just glancing at the code here, it looks like the tool searches any arbitrary file for bytes that look like encoded protobuf descriptors, specifically looking for bytes that are plausibly the beginning of a FileDescriptorProto message defined here:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

This takes advantage of the fact that such descriptors are commonly compiled into programs that use protobuf. The descriptors are usually embedded as constant byte arrays. That said, not all protobuf implementations embed the descriptors and those that do often have an option to inhibit such embedding (at the expense of losing some dynamic introspection features).

Not much. You can check the source code in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf. For example, for serializing a boolean in C#: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/csharp/src/Google.Protobuf/WritingPrimitives.cs#L165. Strings and objects are a bit more complicated, but it is all about turning the data into its byte representation.