DeviceAPI

DeviceAPI is a collection of gems that make working with physical devices easy and consistent. DeviceAPI provides common utilities such as device detection and identification, and useful helpers for installing applications and identifying problems with devices.

We use DeviceAPI heavily to leverage devices in Hive CI. It’s also used by our test developers in their test code. It’s our interface to the devices we test against and is where we put all common code for interacting with our physical devices. It also provides an abstraction so we can deal with devices interchangeably.

This is the base gem on which all DeviceAPI gems are built. It contains the common execution and logging methods, and the base Device class.

Tests are written in rspec, you can run them with:

bundle install
bundle exec rspec

DeviceAPI gems should take a consistent approach to their api where possible.

A new DeviceApi gem should, as a minimum, include a detection method on the class. For example, a DeviceAPI implementation for TVs:

DeviceAPI::TV.devices

... should return an array of device objects of type DeviceAPI::TV.

You should consider adding a way to directly detect a specific device, for example using the serial:

DeviceAPI::TV.device( serial_id )

The device object should contain all accessors to the physical device information:

device.class  #=> DeviceAPI::TV
device.model  #=> 'sony'
device.serial # => 'a221s3144cc23'

And also expose functionality through the same object:

device.reboot()

DeviceAPI is available to everyone under the terms of the MIT open source licence. Take a look at the LICENSE file in the code.

Copyright (c) 2015 BBC