Custom component development—pyOCD plugins

[diggit]

Hi,
Let's say I want to add support for another RTOS, but I don't want to edit pyOCD sources directly. Is pyOCD able to load external components?
e.g. pemicro probe is standalone python package, so I guess it should be possible...

[flit]

Yup! To some extent, at least. Pyocd currently supports RTOS and debug probe plugins. So it sounds like you should be ok.

(I'm converting this issue to a discussion and will continue with more details there.)

[diggit]

Perfect!
Unless there are docs about it, could you nudge me to the correct direction? Eg. where pyOCD looks for these plugins or how to tell it which to load.

[flit]

Pyocd uses setuptools entry points for its plugins. All of the built-in RTOSes and debug probes are also defined and accessed as plugins, so you can see how they are defined in the [options.entry_points] section of setup.cfg. So, to define an external plugin you need to create a Python package or module that exports the relevant entry point(s).

The two entry points that pyocd currently uses are pyocd.probe and pyocd.rtos. The entry point must reference a pyocd.core.plugin.Plugin subclass. This subclass will have some properties with the plugin name, description, any options. The .load() method must return the type-specific implementation class. For RTOS plugins that's a subclass of pyocd.rtos.provider.ThreadProvider.

The FreeRTOSPlugin class is a simple reference example.