Opal Kelly Ruby Gem

This gem provides access to FrontPanel API from Ruby. In order to use this
extension, you must have Opal Kelly FrontPanel SDK installed.

Installation

Ensure that FrontPanel SDK is installed and okFP_SDK environment variable is
defined to point to the location of API subdirectory of the SDK installation.

You also need to have a working C++ compiler in order to build the native
extension which is part of this gem. Under Microsoft Windows systems, you need
to install RubyInstaller to compile
Ruby extensions, unless you already have it. Note that when selecting the file
to download, you should choose a version with development kit (i.e. with
Ruby+DevKit in its name) unless, again, you already have a functioning MSYS2
installation.

If the requirements are satisfied, a simple

> gem install OpalKelly

should build the extension and install the gem. If you get any errors about
missing headers or libraries, please check that okFP_SDK is defined
correctly. If you have the okFrontPanel.h header or the library in some
non-default location, you may also set okFP_SDK_INCLUDE and okFP_SDK_LIBS
environment variables to point to them directly. Finally, you can also specify
their locations on gem install command line after --, e.g.:

> gem install OpalKelly -- --with-frontpanel-include=c:/fp/inc --with-frontpanel-lib=c:/fp/lib

Use

Gem API parallels FrontPanel C++ API, please see the documentation for
more information.

Here is a very simple example which can be used to check that the gem is
installed correctly:

require 'OpalKelly'

puts "Using OpalKelly SDK #{OpalKelly::GetAPIVersionString()}"

Please notice that Ruby programs using this gem must be able to load FrontPanel
SDK shared library during run-time and this may require separate set up:

Under Microsoft Windows systems, you need to set the special RUBY_DLL_PATH
environment variable to the directory containing okFrontPanel.dll to allow
recent Ruby version find this DLL. Please note that having this DLL in one of
the directories included in the usual PATH variable is not sufficient.

Under Unix-like systems, you can simply copy the shared libokFrontPanel.so
library to one of the directories searched by default (e.g. /usr/local/lib)
or add $okFP_SDK to the standard environment variable containing the list of
directories to search, i.e. DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH under macOS or
LD_LIBRARY_PATH elsewhere.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the
MIT License.