Proposal: Let's create a pi4j-bridges subproject

[stefanhaustein]

Let's create a subproject bundling options to drive GPIO / I2C / ... from a "regular" host computer

• Drive 4 GPIO and I2C via MCP2221; see https://github.com/stefanhaustein/pi4j-usb-bridge
• Drive a RPI remotely via @IAmNickNack's remote control implementation Proposal for a Pi4j gRPC API #511
• In the future, perhaps control a BusPirate board via flatbuffers; see: https://docs.buspirate.com/docs/binmode-reference/protocol-bpio2/

Why not separate projects for all of these?

• Let's keep maintenance / maven overhead minimal. On a PC, additional dependencies shouldn't matter as much as on the PI.
• The options are related and people might want to try different options
• We can use in-project modularization if desired

[eitch]

I like this idea a lot!

[stefanhaustein]

Would you be willing to own the deployment/ci setup?

I think the mcp2221 usb bridge implementation should be very close to a good state now... (still needs documentation, but basically it just behaves like a mini-context with 1 I2C and 4 GPIO)

Drivers seem to "just" work on top of this.

[eitch]

Sure, if you can point me in the right direction. I don't have time to implement it, but running tests, validating should be doable.

[stefanhaustein]

I have tentatively created an empty project here: https://github.com/Pi4J/pi4j-bridges

Will seed it from my mcp2221 project soonish

[stefanhaustein]

And just did it by mistake when I actually wanted to create a PR :-/