Alarm panel code

Now I am over the whole broken RS485 cable, I am making a lot more progress.

I have pondered the design a few times and eventually came up with the idea of a C library to manage the low level polling as threads with real time scheduling priority. The library links in to an application.

The threads have shared data structures that allow the application to set things as needed, and the polling system picks up that something has changed and sends the messages needed. It handles resends and waiting for the reply for the message to confirm it is processed.

This means that the application can see the display for a keypad as no more than a char array to which it can write what it likes, and, as if by magic, that text ends up on the display within a few hundred milliseconds, if that. It makes for really easy application coding.

I do have the logic of "events" from the low level system as a queue to the application - being things like devices discovered or missing, tamper alerts, changes of state of inputs, keypad press events, etc... But for the application, all of the low level timing and sequencing is all hidden. It can see a key fob event and set an "open the door" bit, and it just happens.

I have coded the keypad logic so far and should be able to connect a max reader and a RIO soon to code those. Then I can make a proper "alarm panel" application with whatever integration of external systems I wish. I am thinking of a mysql backend for basic config and a web based system to edit and manage that - as that is pretty simple stuff.

Next step - do I open source my library? Maybe when it is finished.