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

Displaying a simple game

In this section, we are going to learn how to use another display type using the SPI interface. We need a new type of display since we want to display more than plain text. We will also discover two more TinyGo repositories that provide handy functions for when we're working with displays. The display we are going to use in this section is a 1.8" TFT ST7735 display with a resolution of 160x128 pixels. So, let's have a brief look at the technical specifications of the display.

The ST7735 display provides an SD card slot, which is optional. The display has a color depth of 262K colors on a TFT-LCD module. The SPI interface is being used with the display. To draw something on the display, we need eight pins. We have already used SPI, but we did not have a deeper look at it, since the devices can be arranged on an SPI bus in different ways. So, let's gain a better understanding of how SPI works before we use the display in an example project...