README for Realtime FSM
by Calin Culianu <[email protected]> 

This is the Realtime FSM originally developed for Cold Spring Harbor Labs.  It
contains the 'Embedded C' modifications so that you can have your state machines
execute arbitrary code. 

This system is basically a server that runs on an RTAI-enabled system.  It
listens for connections on port 3333 and expects clients to upload state-machine
programs to it via the network.  

There is currently only one client implementation, written in Matlab (see the
Client/Matlab directory).  This is because most experimentalists use Matlab
extensively.   However, nothing is stopping you from using the same protocol and
re-implementing a client in any language.  The protocol is not currently
documented, but reading the user/FSMServer.cpp or the Matlab @RTLSM class might
be a place to start if you wish to re-implement the protocol.  It is a simple
text-based protocol, and is not terribly cryptic.

A NOTE ABOUT THE PLATFORM

Originally, this was developed for RTLinux running on 2.4 kernels with no SMP
support.  Since RTLinux appears to be a dead platform I have decided to port
this to RTAI 3.x running on 2.6 kernels *with* SMP support.

So, to get this working, read the INSTALL docs.  


NOTE TO KERNEL 2.4 and RTLINUX USERS:

This sourcecode tried to maintain backwards compatibility with 2.4 and RTLinux,
HOWEVER the build system doesn't know how to build 2.4 kernel modules anymore. 
To get it to run on old kernels, you have to play with the makefiles yourself to
get it to point to the right header dirs, and you should set the CPP define
'RTLINUX' when building the kernel module.