Added a plugin manager and 2 plugins

[dimtass]

Hi all.
I've added a plugin manager and two plugins.
The plugin manager adds the plugins in a QVBoxLayout (m_pluginsLayout) on the main form.
The supported plugins are listed on the Plugins menu, so every new plugin should be added there.
The plugin manager is quite simple and the only requirement is that the plugins have a QFrame with a Plugin class instance. The frame shouldn't occupy many pixels height on the main window, therefore if many settings or controls are needed then you can use another dialog. The macro and netproxy plugins do exactly that.

You can add as many instances of the plugin you like using the plugin menu. Therefore, every plugin must have an unload option to remove itself from the main window.

The plugin manager supports the following functions

• Get the incoming data from the serial port and send them to the plugins
• Send data from the plugins to the serial port
• Before send the data to the serial port allows the plugins to edit the data

For the last one, I'll also add another plugin soon that applies regex to replace data in the outstream.

The plugings are written in a way that you can load multiple instances as long as they don't use the same resources.

The macro plugin allows the user to store macros and it's pretty straight forward. Just press the macro button and the string is sent.
The netproxy plugin allows you to bind a UDP socket and run a TCP server (simultaneously) and proxy data from/to both sides. Therefore, you can send/receive data to the serial port from a UDP/TCP client. I believe there are many people that will find this very convenient and useful.

I've tried to keep things very simple and not add much code in the main code. Therefore in the main window there are only a few new lines of code and everything else is done in the plugin manager.

Dimitris

[cyc1ingsir]

This looks good to me. I can't test thoroughly though. At least it runs on my local machine.
It would be really cool to have proper unit tests (being heavily influenced by JUnit at the moment).
So I'm going to merge your PR and will prepare the 0.50.0 release within the next days.

[cyc1ingsir]

Thank you!

[dimtass]

Hi Meinhard,
thanks for the merge. When are you going to release the 0.50? I was wondering if I got the time to add a tx/rx counter plugin with a lap-like functionality that is used in timers and also a regex plugin to substitute data on the fly during tx/rx.

I don't have unit tests, but I've profiled with vagrant and tried to find any issues.
If you have any suggestion for unit tests I'm open to discussion and adapt a well tested workflow, as my domain is the the very low embedded stuff and also linux kernel development and therefore I have a different workflow.