1# lws meta-drivers 2 3Although drivers in lws (enabled in cmake by `LWS_WITH_DRIVERS`) provide 4actual drivers for some devices like I2C OLED controllers, their main job is 5to conceal from user code the underlying OS APIs being used to interface 6to the SoC hardware assets. 7 8CMake already allows lws to be platform-agnostic for build, the plat adaptations 9allow lws to be platform-agnostic within itself for runtime. The lws 10drivers intend to extend that agnosticism to user code. 11 12Using this technique on supported OSes frees the user code from dependencies 13on the underlying OS choice... for example, although ESP32 is very good, it 14comes with a highly specific set of apis in esp-idf that mean your code is 15locked in to esp-idf if you follow them. Esp-idf uses freertos apis for things 16like OS timers, again if you follow those you are locked into freertos, the 17end result is your work is non-portable to other platforms and completely 18dependent on esp. 19 20LWS drivers provide a thin wrapper to eliminate the OS dependencies while 21still taking advantage of the work, drivers and maintenance of the underlying 22OS layer without duplicating them, but bringing the flexibility to retarget 23your work to other scenarios... for example, there is a generic gpio object 24subclassed for specific implementations, an i2c object which may be subclassed 25to use OS drivers or bitbang using the generic gpio object, buttons on top of 26generic gpio, led class that can use generic gpio or pwm interchangeably, 27platform-specific gpio, i2c, pwm implementations that can be used at the generic 28level are defined to use underlying OS native apis and drivers. 29 30## Building on the next layer up 31 32At these generic objects like buttons or led controllers, there is a stable 33codebase used by multiple implementations and the intention is to provide 34best-of-breed features there generically, like 35 36 - sophisticated button press debounce and classification 37 38 - high quality transitions and log-response compensation and mixing for led pwm 39 40 - display dimming timers, blanking timers, generic interaction detection to unblank 41 42which are automatically available on top of any implementation that is ported to 43lws drivers. 44 45