Book Image

Creative DIY Microcontroller Projects with TinyGo and WebAssembly

By : Tobias Theel
Book Image

Creative DIY Microcontroller Projects with TinyGo and WebAssembly

By: Tobias Theel

Overview of this book

While often considered a fast and compact programming language, Go usually creates large executables that are difficult to run on low-memory or low-powered devices such as microcontrollers or IoT. TinyGo is a new compiler that allows developers to compile their programs for such low-powered devices. As TinyGo supports all the standard features of the Go programming language, you won't have to tweak the code to fit on the microcontroller. This book is a hands-on guide packed full of interesting DIY projects that will show you how to build embedded applications. You will learn how to program sensors and work with microcontrollers such as Arduino UNO and Arduino Nano IoT 33. The chapters that follow will show you how to develop multiple real-world embedded projects using a variety of popular devices such as LEDs, 7-segment displays, and timers. Next, you will progress to build interactive prototypes such as a traffic lights system, touchless hand wash timer, and more. As you advance, you'll create an IoT prototype of a weather alert system and display those alerts on the TinyGo WASM dashboard. Finally, you will build a home automation project that displays stats on the TinyGo WASM dashboard. By the end of this microcontroller book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to build real-world embedded projects using the power of TinyGo.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
10
Afterword

Sending MQTT messages to a broker

Let's now start to dive into the world of IoT. As every device that has a connection to the internet—or at least to some network—can be considered an IoT device, the project in this section can be considered an IoT project. The Arduino Nano 33 IoT has a u-blox NINA-W102 chip on board that is capable of Wi-Fi communication. We can communicate with this chip using the SPI interface. As a driver for the NINA chip already exists, we don't have to implement one ourselves.

So, our plan is to send data through SPI to the NINA chip, which then sends the data through the network to an MQTT broker. The following diagram illustrates the process:

Figure 7.5 – Communication diagram

Although the driver functionality is wrapped in a package, some boilerplate code is still needed to start using the Wi-Fi chip. So, let's wrap it inside a new package.

Implementing the Wi-Fi package

We are going...