Dyalog Forums

After years of using APL within the Financial Math domain this time is over, now is the time to change. Looking for a new place where I can cultivate my loved APL I'm recently collaborating with a team of young Biomedical Engineers. This represents to me a way to use my personal time being also useful for people with physical problems or to help to improve biomedical diagnostic equipment.

For this reason I'm looking with curiosity at the Dyalog APL for Raspberry Pi and at the moment I'm reading/studying about it.

I'm very new on this subject, so I'd ask this community if Dyalog have or had experiences in this domain and/or, more in general, if this application domain can "sound" interesting for Dyalog.

Any advice/suggestion from you is very welcome.

Although I have no experience with "Biomedical Engineering" as such, I have some experience with interfacing "sensors" using Dyalog APL with the Raspberry Pi (RPi) in real time.

My assumption is that "Biomedical Engineering" will use many biomedical sensors with numeric (rather than boolean) output (and input) and will be physically connecting to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins and using I2C protocol.

(Some devices may alternatively use a serial "com(s)" port, which can also be achieved on the RPi, using its GPIO pins).

There is an excellent package called PIGPIO supporting all aspect of GPIO functionality on the RPi, and has libraries for both Python and C. I am in the process of writing and testing an APL interface (accessed via ⎕NA calls) to the PIGPIO's C library. The C library has some 148 different GPIO utility function available. (See http://abyz.co.uk/rpi/pigpio/index.html)

So far I have got 6 different I2C devices "talking" successfully with the RPi via PIGPIO/APL (in addition to many non-I2C devices).

The PIGPIO libraries also support serial devices (think the old mouse connected via the COM port) but I have not tested any of this code yet from APL.

There are other libraries supporting the RPi's GPIO pins, but most of which are designed to be accessed from PYTHON. I have had no success accessing any Python Libraries from APL using ⎕NA calls.
(I believe the Python based shared object libraries make "python system calls" so require Python to also be running.)

NOTE. I am using the term libraries loosely to mean "Shared Objects" (".so" extension), the Linux equivalent of a Windows Dynamic Link Library (".DLL").