TinyGo: Getting the upper hen (GopherConUK 2022)

Do you want to combine your love for Go and a useful personal project? How about monitoring your hen house using TinyGo! With any microcontroller and a few materials, you will have enough horsepower to build a basic monitoring system and pamper your chickens.

TinyGo is a Go compiler for small places such as microcontroller or web. Starting from a basic understanding of what is TinyGo, learn how to:
- Use the appropriate driver for your hardware
- Retrieve data from a thermometer and humidity captor
- Communicate with your microcontroller using wifi
- Build a dashboard with temperature and humidity data
- Check that your hens are doing well, from your couch

And if you still do not want to adopt chickens, you can let your creativity talk and you will be able to build your own project using our favourite language.

Transcript

1. TinyGo: Getting the
   upper hen
   GopherCon UK, London - 17 August 2022
   Donia Chaiehloudj
   Powder
   @doniacld
   

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2. My ideal hen house 01
   What is TinyGo?
   What’s the plan?
   Demo time
   Things I learned
   02
   03
   04
   05
   06
   What’s next?
   

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3. MY IDEAL HEN HOUSE
   01. My ideal hen house
   ● Monitor my hen house
   ○ temperature
   ○ humidity
   ● Visualise the metrics
   

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4. THE GOAL
   01. My ideal hen house
   

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5. — TinyGo website at tinygo.org
   TinyGo is a compiler for
   the Go programming
   language but for
   smaller kinds of
   systems.
   

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6. SMALL SYSTEMS
   02. What is TinyGo?
   ● Microcontrollers (86 boards)
   ● WebAssembly
   ● Tiny CLI
   

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7. TINYGO COMPILER: HISTORY
   https://aykevl.nl/
   02. What is TinyGo?
   Ayke exploring
   existing projects
   01/02/19
   TinyGo 0.1
   TinyGo used by
   the industry
   TinyGo adopted by
   users for side projects
   03/02/19
   FOSDEM
   @aurelievache
   

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8. TINYGO COMPILER: ANOTHER GO COMPILER
   The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compilers.
   https://tinygo.org/docs/concepts/compiler-internals/pipeline/
   02. What is TinyGo?
   

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9. GO VS TINYGO: HELLO WORLD SIZE
   ❯ go build -o bin/helloworld-go hello/hello_world.go
   ❯ tinygo build -o bin/helloworld-tinygo hello/hello_world.go
   ❯ ll bin/
   total 5120
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 doniacld staff 1.8M Aug 14 18:40 helloworld-go
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 doniacld staff 29K Aug 14 18:41 helloworld-tinygo
   go version go1.18.5 darwin/arm64
   0.24.0 darwin/amd64 (using go version go1.18.5 and LLVM version 14.0.0)
   02. What is TinyGo?
   

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10. GO VS TINYGO: GO LANGUAGE FEATURES
    02. What is TinyGo?
    Concurrency ✅ Concurrency != Parallelism
    Reflection 󰠼 Marshal structure with json fields doesn't work
    Garbage Collection ✅ -gc=none, -gc=leaking, -gc=conservative
    Standard libraries 󰠼 Packages supported by TinyGo e.g.: net/http
    🎯 Compatibility with Go ecosystem
    

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11. FLASH COMMAND
    tinygo flash -target= .go
    1. Compiles the program on your computer
    2. Writes it on chip memory (ROM)
    3. Runs it on the chip
    NB: Built-in led is blinking while writing
    02. What is TinyGo?
    

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12. FLASH COMMAND
    tinygo flash -target= .go
    1. Compiles the program on your computer
    2. Writes it on chip memory (ROM)
    3. Runs it on the chip
    NB: Built-in led is blinking while writing
    02. What is TinyGo?
    

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13. LET’S DEBUG
    02. What is TinyGo?
    

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14. DEBUGGING TOOLS
    ❯ ll /dev/tty.*
    02. What is TinyGo?
    Serial port: connector by which a device sends data one bit at a time.
    

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15. https://github.com/doniacld/tinygo-discovery/blob/main/hello/hello_gophers.go
    https://github.com/doniacld/tinygo-discovery/blob/main/utils/read_serial.go
    READ FROM THE SERIAL PORT
    02. What is TinyGo?
    ❯ go run hello_gophers.go
    2022/08/14 18:23:14 Hi London! What's up GopherCon UK 2022?
    2022/08/14 18:23:15 Hi London! What's up GopherCon UK 2022?
    ❯ go run utils/read_serial.go -port /dev/cu.usbmodem1401
    1970/01/01 00:00:03 Hi London! What's up GopherCon UK 2022?
    1970/01/01 00:00:04 Hi London! What's up GopherCon UK 2022?
    

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16. DEBUGGING TOOLS
    02. What is TinyGo?
    TinyGo built-in debugging tool for binary on chip
    ● based on gdb
    ● debug probes not included on every board
    ● observe scheduler
    $ tinygo gdb -target=microbit examples/microbit-blink
    [...]
    target halted due to debug-request, current mode: Thread
    xPSR: 0xc1000000 pc: 0x0000071c msp: 0x20000800
    (gdb) continue
    Continuing.
    ...
    

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17. ELECTRICAL CIRCUIT
    03. What’s the plan?
    Arduino Nano 33 IoT DHT22
    DATA
    GROUND
    VCC
    

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18. THE BIG PICTURE
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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19. PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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20. USEFUL TINYGO PACKAGES
    https://github.com/doniacld/tinygo-discovery/blob/main/tiny-hen/main.go
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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21. MEASUREMENT PSEUDO CODE
    https://github.com/doniacld/tinygo-discovery/blob/main/tiny-hen/main.go
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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22. THE GOOD OLD GO WEB SERVER
    https://xkcd.com/910/
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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23. GO WEB SERVER: PROMETHEUS GAUGE DEFINITIONS
    https://github.com/doniacld/tiny-hen/blob/main/cmd/prommetric/metric.go
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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24. INFRASTRUCTURE
    03. What’s the plan?
    

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25. Demo time
    https://tinyurl.com/gopher-praying-sticker
    

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26. TINYGO CHEAT SHEET
    05. Things I learned
    ● TinyGo: Go compiler for small places
    ● Flash: tinygo flash -target= main.go
    ● TinyGo drivers examples are a treasure chest 💎
    ● Hardware recommendations: samd21/samd51 board, or an rp2040
    or TinyGo Playground
    ● You can enter the IoT world with your current skills and your IDE
    ○ VS code plugin
    ○ GoLand plugin
    

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27. WHAT’S NEXT?
    ● Use async protocol (MQTT)
    ● Long range WiFi board (LoRaWAN)
    ● Deploy in the cloud
    ● Add a fox detection system
    https://tinyurl.com/gopher-far-west-sticker
    06. What’s next?
    

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28. https://github.com/doniacld/tinygo-discovery
    https://github.com/doniacld/tiny-hen
    @doniacld
    THANK YOU 🐣
    

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29. RESOURCES
    @doniacld
    ● TinyGo doc
    ● Go doc
    ● TinyGo discovery examples repository
    ● TinyHen project repository
    ● Kube stack prometheus doc
    ● Grafana dashboards Kubernetes
    

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