Installing custom components

Custom components are defined in python modules and can be installed via standard python packaging tools such as pip. Generally these modules must be installed onto the Raspberry Pi running the eVOLVER server, as they will be loaded upon deserialization of the configuration file which references them.

For example, if you have a custom hardware driver defined in a python module named my_custom_hardware within a public github repository, you can install it using pip like so:

# ssh into the Raspberry Pi running the eVOLVER server
ssh pi@<evolver-ip-address>

# then install the custom hardware package
pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/username/my-custom-hardware-package.git

Then, you can reference this custom hardware in your configuration file by using its fully qualified class name (assuming you have defined a class implementing a SensorDriver defined in the my_custom_hardware.py module), such as:

hardware:
  MyCustomSensor:
    classinfo: "my_custom_hardware.MyCustomSensorDriver"
    config:
      addr: "custom_sensor_address"
      integrations: 1000

For more details on packaging and distribution of python components, see https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/. This repository also serves as an example of python packaging, and can be similarly installed via pip and git as described above.