Eclipse MRAA

Eclipse MRAA (pronounced em-rah) is a low-level library written in the C/C++ language. MRAA abstracts the details associated with accessing and manipulating the basic I/O capabilities of popular IoT platforms and boards and presents a single, concise API delivering the following architectural features:

• Physical Pin Mapping: MRAA provides clear and consistent API function calls that match the corresponding physical pin labels on supported IoT boards.
• Kernel to User Space I/O Abstraction: MRAA serves as a translation layer on top of the Linux* I/O facilities. Although Linux* provides a fairly rich infrastructure for manipulating GPIOs and standard bus protocols, it does so at the kernel level. This presents difficulty for developers not experienced with device drivers, and it does not promote user-space rapid prototyping.
• I/O Expansion: MRAA provides access to I/O expanders and Arduino* MCUs, via Firmata*, connected to a Linux* host running MRAA, using the same API classes found on regular boards. The MRAA project refers to these expanders as subplatforms, and the application runs on the Linux host.
• Portability: Applications developed with the MRAA library can be ported to other supported boards if the same type of I/O exists on the new target. Furthermore, the C APIs simplify portability between Linux* boards and MCUs running Zephyr* RTOS through the use of the ZMRAA project which provides a near one-to-one mapping for the API calls.

NOTE: Although MRAA can be used to write platform-independent code, developers are still responsible for ensuring that code is robust enough to run on various target platforms and accommodate their specific limitations.