Fid - Code Gen for Hardware Integrations

Don’t want to spend your precious hackathon hours scrolling through spec sheets and writing boilerplate integration code?

We’re excited to be offering free access to a special early alpha release of Fid for participants of the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon, 2/17-18/2024.

With Fid you can automate away the integration work and focus on what’s really special about your project.

P.S. If you have any issues at all with this guide or the extension, or just want to chat all things dev tools and integrations workflows, please don’t hesitate to Slack me in the hackathon workspace or just find me in person! - Adam Wolnikowski

Note

This project is under active development.

Installation

You can install Fid here on the VS Code Marketplace. You may need to update to the latest version of VS Code.

Usage

Open the extension view by clicking on the Fid logo in the activity bar on the left (it’s curly braces combined with rope).

Begin by selecting some documentation for the component you’d like to work with, such as a spec sheet or API reference that Fid can reference for generating your integration code. At this time, the alpha only supports PDFs.

Make sure to add any relevent additional instructions in the Additional Input field, such as what programming lanuage to use. You can also use this field to play with creative workflows such as marking spots in an existing file with placeholder comments where you’d like Fid to make additions. If you’d like to use the active file as input, make sure to check Include Current File, otherwise leave this unchecked. We’re leaving this very open-ended for the alpha to see what unique workflows you develop!

Fid is most powerful when it can iterate on its output with feedback from your build system. In order to enable this, specify the build command and absolute build path in the appropriate fields, and check Enable Iteration. At this time, the alpha only supports cmake.

Finally, click the Generate button at the top of the extension view. Fid will automatically overwrite the currently opened file, but changes are saved in VS Code’s edit history so you can revert all changes with Undo.

What’s a fid?

A fid is a tool for splicing rope. Fid splices code.