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

Exploring the TinyGo drivers

In Chapter 3, Building a Safety Lock Using a Keypad, we learned about the TinyGo drivers repository. Let's have a brief look at how to find drivers and examples in this repository.

When you're planning a new project, it is always good to check if the drivers repository has drivers for the devices you plan to use. It will speed up your project and make it easier to implement.

The drivers repository is split into two parts:

  • The drivers
  • Examples

The drivers directly reside in the root of the repository. All the examples are inside an example folder.

We want to use an hd44780 LCD display with an I2C interface in our example, so let's check if we can find it inside the drivers repository. Refer to the following screenshot:

Figure 6.1 – An hd44780i2c driver

As we can see, the package is named after the device and the interface (I2C) it uses. Sometimes, a driver package provides more...