I’m currently developing software that depends on the FrontPanel SDK both for in-house and open-source (BSD/MIT license) distribution. I was wondering what are the redistribution terms of FrontPanel DLLs? Is it ok if I redistribute the dependency DLLs with the software, or do end-users also have to go through the Opal Kelly registration process to download the DLLs? Same question with regard to XEM driver software.
Sorry if this is well-known, but it wasn’t obvious for me from all the FrontPanel documentation I looked at or even forum and internet posts exactly how one is expected to do it and I couldn’t find many examples online of people doing it.
The FrontPanel SDK can be distributed with any product that includes one of our FPGA modules. For your in-house projects, of course the “customer” is your organization and you’ll already have the SDK as part of the module purchase.
For the open-source distribution, the end users will presumably need to purchase one of our FPGA modules, so they will have the SDK as part of that purchase. For this distribution, you should not distribute the SDK but tell the end user where to put the DLL to properly operate with your software.
Thank you for the clarification. Any suggestions on how to automate this process? I noticed that for drivers you state in the FAQ that it’s possible to include the DriverOnly installer into redistributable packages, but I guess this would also be only for products that already include the FPGA module and not for software-only distributions, correct?
You are right that the end-users of the open-source distribution are also going to buy their own FPGA modules, but I wanted to make it easy for them to install the open-source software without requiring a manual copy step…
Is there any way to know where the Opal Kelly FrontPanel official distribution is installed on Windows? If there was something like a registry key or environment variable then maybe I could query the system about whether the FrontPanel is already installed and extract the location from there. That way I could simultaneously comply with okFrontPanel distribution terms and with the requirements of having an easy to install package working on top of FrontPanel.