Add first part of a developer documentation

David Graeff · David Gräff
1 parent 79301088
Showing 2 changed files with 60 additions and 1 deletions
openhantek/readme.md
openhantek/src/usb/readme.md
+# OpenHantek developer documentation
+
+This document explains the basic data flow and concepts used and should be amended
+whenever a new concept is added to the code base.
+Detailed information about an implementation are to be found in the specific directory readmes though.
+
+## Directory structure
+
+The *res* folder contains mostly binary resource data that are bundled with the executable,
+like icons, images and firmwares.
+
+The *translations* folder contains translations in the Qt format. Use Qt linguist
+as a handy graphical interface to translate OpenHantek.
+
+The source code within *src* can be divided into a **core**, that is responsible for device communication,
+data acquisition and post processing and the **graphical interface** with several custom widgets,
+a configuration interface and an OpenGL renderer.
+
+### Core structure
+
+The raw device communcation takes place in the *src/usb* directory, especially via the `USBDevice` class.
+To find suitable devices, the `FindDevices` class in the same folder is used. Firmware upload is realized
+via the `ezusb` helper methods and the `UploadFirmware` class.
+
+The hantek protocol structures and constants are defined within `src/hantekprotocol`.
+
+The heart of OpenHantek is the `src/hantekdso` folder and its `hantekdsocontrol` class. All supported
+models, based on the `DsoModel` class, are implemented within a subfolder `src/hantekdso/models` and automatically register themself
+to a `ModelRegistry` class. A model is based on (contains) a specification, the `ControlSpecification` class.
+
+The `hantekdsocontrol` class keeps track of the devices current state (samplerate, selected gain, activated channels, etc)
+via the `ControlSettings` class and field.
+It outputs the channel separated unprocessed samples via a `samplesAvailable(DSOsamples*)` signal.
+
+Before the data is presented to the GUI it arrives in the `src/post/postprocessing` class. Several post
+processing classes are to be found in this directory as well.
+
+### Graphical interface structure
+
+The initial dialog for device selection is realized in *src/selectdevice* where several models
+and dialogs are implemented. This is basically a graphical wrapper around the `src/usb/finddevices` class.
+
+You will find the configuration dialog pages to be implemented in *src/configdialog*.
+
+Custom widgets like a LevelSlider with a unit suffix reside in *src/widgets*, the custom main window docks are
+in *src/docks*.
+
+The code that is responsible for exporting data to images or to the printer is stored in *src/exporting*.
+
+The main window itself doesn't do and shouldn't do much more than connecting signals/slots between the core part
+and the graphical part.
+
+All OpenGL rendering takes place in the `GlScope` class. A helper class `GlScopeGraph` contains exactly one
+data sample snapshot including all channels for voltage and spectrum and a pointer to the respective GPU buffer.
+`GlScope` works for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL ES 2.0, but this needs to be decided at compile time. Usually Qt
+selects the right interface.
+
+## Data flow
+
+To be written
@@ -4,4 +4,3 @@ USB transfer functionality.
  
 # Dependency
 Files in this directory should NOT depend on anything outside of this directory.
-An exception are classes from the `utils` folder.