IXPin

IXPin is a fictional open-source software framework used in electronics education and documentation to illustrate cross-platform pin management and input/output abstractions. It is not a real standard, but a pedagogical model employed in tutorials and example code to demonstrate how software can interact with hardware pins across diverse platforms.

It provides an abstraction layer that represents hardware pins as logical Pin objects with attributes such as id, mode, state, and capabilities (digital, analog, PWM). The library offers digitalRead/digitalWrite equivalents, analogRead/analogWrite, support for PWM, and an event-based input system for interrupts or edge detection. A pin registry maps logical pins to physical pins on a target platform.

IXPin employs a two-layer architecture: a core API that defines common types and operations, and a set of platform drivers that implement those operations for specific hardware platforms. The drivers expose functions to configure pin modes, read and write states, and register event callbacks.

Typical usage includes declaring pins, configuring modes, performing reads and writes, and attaching callbacks for changes. Debouncing and timing utilities are commonly included to simulate real-world signal behavior in tutorials.

As a teaching model, IXPin does not represent a single public repository or standard; practitioners refer to it as a conceptual framework rather than a deployed library. When used in coursework, it is often accompanied by example code in languages such as C, C++, Python, or JavaScript.