Bulldog is a Java library for the Beaglebone Black and the Raspberry PI.

It's development has been handed over to the fine folks at silverspoon, but many features are already usable and stable.

Intention :

Bulldog provides GPIO and low-level IO capabilities for embedded linux systems. It currently only supports the BeagleBone Black but is written with portability in mind.

It's major concept for GPIO is the PinFeature API.

  DigitalOutput output = board.getPin("P8_12").as(DigitalOutput.class);
  DigitalInput input = board.getPin("P8_11").as(DigitalInput.class);

See the bulldog.examples project to get an idea.

That way, the responsibilities are encapsulated and we don't have a Pin-Class that takes too many responsibilities. It is also easily extensible.

Supports :

Bulldog currently supports the following features on the BeagleBoneBlack:

1. Digital Input/Output on Pins
2. Native Interrupts via epoll (easily usable on DigitalInputs)
3. Native PWM
4. Native ADC
5. I2C
6. All UARTs (including dynamic setup via capemgr on request)
7. SPI
8. A few devices: Simple button API, Incremental Rotary Encoder, Servos

Build :

You'll need gradle installed and a cross compiler for arm. You'll have to adjust the toolchain path in bulldog.build/gradle.properties Afterwards, just run this command to build all the distributions and javadocs

   gradle -x test --daemon clean build docs distribution archiveDistributions

It will produce a single jar called bulldog.<boardname>.jar and a native library called libbulldog-linux.so. The latter can be found in the bulldog.linux.native build directory. Alternatively, you can find them prebuilt in the dist directory.

Usage :

You can just reference the jar in your classpath. Make sure the native library libbulldog-linux.so is in the same directory as bulldog.<boardname>.jar. You can find the most recent binaries in the dist directory.

For API usage see the bulldog.examples project.

External reference :

To achieve high pin toggling speeds and maximum performance, it uses VegetableAvenger's excellent BBIOlib: https://github.com/VegetableAvenger/BBBIOlib The only working lib that was found for the 3.8 kernel!

Thanks VegetableAvenger!