C

• Main components
• Target support and portability
• Environment setup
  • Build in Nix shell
  • Build configuration

The Kaa C SDK is a portable, lightweight and fast library that provides APIs for Kaa clients to utilize various platform features. This SDK is designed to facilitate the end-user development process efforts and decrease the time-to-market for your IoT embedded solutions.

Kaa C SDK offers a number of advantages for your embedded solutions:

• Small footprint
• Modularity
• Low memory consumption
• Portability
• Performance

This makes Kaa C SDK a perfect choice even for use with low-power and low-cost microcontrollers.

You don’t need any operating system to use C SDK, so you can use it in bare metal systems.

You can find auto-generated docs for Kaa C SDK here.

Main components

Kaa C SDK comprises the following functional parts:

• SDK core starts the application main loop and controls the SDK execution processes. The corresponding APIs are located in the kaa/platform/kaa_client.h file.

• Build system allows generating and customizing the project files without having to create a build infrastructure for every compiler or IDE used. The build system is written using CMake.

• Extensions are the application-level modules within SDK that provide implementations of Kaa platform key features. Extensions are exposed to the user in a form of headers that are located in the src/extensions directory.

Target support and portability

C SDK contains a platform abstraction layer that hides differences across platforms, such as memory allocation procedures or time routines. Its interface is located in the kaa/platform/ directory.

Below is the list of the target platforms for which Kaa C SDK already has an implementation of the platform layer:

• POSIX
  • Linux
  • UDOO
  • Raspberry PI
  • Beaglebone
  • QNX Neutrino
  • Windows (cygwin)
• ESP8266
• CC3200

Environment setup

During compilation, Kaa C SDK and the derived applications might require:

• A compiler for the chosen taget platform, such as arm-none-eabi for bare metal ARM targets.
• Vendor SDK, e.g. TI SDK for the CC3200 processor.

Build in Nix shell

Nix is a package manager which is used to manage Kaa C and C++ SDKs build environment for CI purposes. You can use it to build Kaa C SDK quickly.

For more details on using Nix in C and C++ SDKs refer to Nix guide.

Build configuration

Build configuration is performed on the Makefile file generation stage. If you want to pass a configuration parameter, prefixed it with -D.

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/username/installdir

This way you can customize your build for Kaa C SDK. For example, you can disable debug logging to decrease memory footprint.

The list of available configuration parameters is located in the CMakeLists.txt file.