Memory Constrained Environments

[mateusz-]

Hello,

I don't know much about HDF5. I was able to build it just now for my microcontroller. I did have to make some modifications to the project in order to do that (e.g. removed all the H5Pl* sources from CMakeLists.txt). With MinSizeRel, the libhdf5.a ends up being approximately 8.7MB.

I'm guessing shrinking down the library to, say, 200KB is not feasible, but I wanted to check.

Would HDF4 be a better fit?

[jhendersonHDF]

Hi @mateusz-,

I would say that a smaller library size has not necessarily been a major focus of HDF5 to this point. It would likely be difficult for us to reduce the size of the static library without significant effort, but this may be something that could be addressed in the future by making the library more modular. But as HDF5 is an open file format, you might be able to find a third-party library that is able to write HDF5 files and can work within your environment.

As far as HDF5 vs. HDF4, HDF5 is generally the main focus of the HDF Group and is designed to be a bit more modern than HDF4. While we still do regular releases of HDF4, these are just maintenance releases and I would point you toward HDF5 instead.

[hyoklee]

@mateusz- , what's your microcontroller? Can you post a URL for its Datasheet?

[mateusz-]

It's nRF52833. Here's a datasheet.

[hyoklee]

Hi, @mateusz- , thank you for sending me the datasheet.
Do you have a list (HDF5) APIs that are absolutely critical for your microcontroller?
E.g., do you need only APIs for writing data from your sensors?

If you can use java, you may consider https://github.com/jamesmudd/jhdf/releases/tag/v0.10.0 .
The jar file has 298K.