Introduction
Elwood Downey started the INDI Protocol initiative in 2003 to develop a platform and client independent control protocol. INDI is a simple XML-like protocol described for interactive and automated remote control of diverse instrumentation. It is small, easy to parse and stateless. In the INDI paradigm each Device poses all command and status functions in terms of setting and getting Properties. Each Property is a vector of one or more named members. Each Property has a current value vector; a target value vector; provides information about how it should be sequenced with respect to other Properties to accomplish one coordinated unit of observation; and provides hints as to how it might be displayed for interactive manipulation in a GUI. Clients learn the Properties of a particular Device at runtime using introspection.
This decouples Client and Device implementation histories. Devices have complete authority over whether to accept commands from Clients. INDI accommodates intermediate servers, broadcasting, and connection topologies ranging from one-to-one on a single system to many-to-many between systems of different genre. The INDI protocol can be nested within other XML elements such as RTML to add constraints for automatic scheduling and execution.
Read more about this topic: Instrument Neutral Distributed Interface
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