Reg Universal Driver API

[deenam]

Hi,

In the presentations Microsoft is talking about Universal Sensor driver architecture for Windows 10.
I hope the intention to come up with an abstraction layer so that application developers can use these universal API's and need bother to write the device drivers for each devices.

Does this mean Microsoft is coming up with following two approaches ?
Hardware Sensor Manufacturer ----(develops driver) ---conforms to the universal Sensor interface API standards - plugs in seamlessly into any Windows 10 platform
Hardware Sensor Manufacturer ---(uses Microsoft SDK kit for developing driver for the sensor) ---exposes the standard APIs plugs in seamlessly into any Windows 10 platform

Has Microsoft taken up some set of the sensors available in the market and created universal API based on that.

[jtanner_msft]

Thanks for your questions. I’ll try my best to answer them for you but if I miss your meaning please let me know.

On Windows IoT Core, all drivers must be ‘Universal Drivers’. That means that a Universal driver will be able to run on the desktop, phone or IoT Core device. Depending upon the processor running on each device you might need to compile it to a different target. So on a desktop you might want x64 or x86, while on Phone or IoT Core you might want to target ARM.

Certain platforms that Microsoft is supporting will include a number of drivers out of the box, such as Minnow Board Max from Intel, or the Raspberry Pi 2. We will also be releasing development images that IoT Makers can use for testing and development of projects. Those platforms also include a driver for support of things like GPIO an I2C.

In addition to the actual drivers, there are now some new namespaces which have been introduced which Universal Applications can take advantage of if the hardware is present on the system. These include GPIO & I2C:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 2147217396
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.i2c.aspx

So you could build a universal app that always targets GPIO, and so long as the board you try to run it on has a Universal Driver for GPIO and it supports the windows.devices.GPIO namespace, then it should be able to run.

But keep in mind that since Maker projects can be very specific the application might only run correctly if you have the correct sensors and other components correctly wired to the correct GPIO pins, etc.

I hope this answers your questions about how ‘Universal’ Windows 10 IoT Core devices, drivers and applications will be.