Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud Native Wasm Day EU 2022, 19 May 2022

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From YouTube: Lightning Talk: From Hardware Simulation to Real Devices with WebAssembly Using TinyGo - Ron Evans

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Lightning Talk: From Hardware Simulation to Real Devices with WebAssembly Using TinyGo - Ron Evans, The Hybrid Group

TinyGo (https://tinygo.org/) is a compiler for the Go programming language that is able to produce WebAssembly code that is significantly smaller than the main Go compiler. The TinyGo Playground (https://play.tinygo.org/) is an online web application which lets you compile your code for physical devices in the cloud, and then play with it in your browser using a WebAssembly simulator. You can then also download the native binary code that can execute on real devices using like ARM, Arduino, and even RISC-V. This talk will include live code demonstrations with both simulated and also real-world physical hardware, all using code compiled using the TinyGo Playground, as well as showing some of how the Playground itself is built.

A

Welcome to from hardware simulation to real devices with web assembly using tiny, go I'm entirely too long of a title. I'd like to take one minute of my brief time to thank you, organizers, you participants, the sponsors and all the people involved with this for bringing me back into the real world. It's amazing, I didn't know it was still here, so I am dead program.

A

Some humans call me dad. Others call me wrong, but the important thing is. I am dead program in the internets that matter technologist for hire. This is my title.

A

I was told to be very subtle, so I'm trying that out, I have a consultancy called the hybrid group where we were all technologists for hire and we write the software for hardware companies, some of which you may have heard of, but today I'm here to talk about tiny, go an amazing project that we've been involved with since its inception and tiny go is a go compiler for small places, small like really tiny places, for example microcontrollers like arduinos and web assembly, which is of course, why we're all here.

A

So a good size comparison is always good. So, let's start with, is anybody here never programmed in go okay? Well we're going to start with a hello world which is package main, which says this is our main package, our main unit of code, our function main, which is our main function, and then we're going to print line hello world and that's it. So if we go over here to my terminal.

B

And we go to make hello.

A

Let's go make hello run, so this is going to run that same program, both in regular standard go and in tiny go, and it's got the same output, hello, world. Okay, that's good! So now, let's say hello build which is going to actually build them both into binary executables, not just run them and then make hello size.

A

So the regular go that somewhat inconsequential program is 1.1 megabytes, whereas the exact same tiny go program is 67k. Thank you good night. No, wait how? How do you do that? Is that even possible? Yes, yes, it is possible. So, but what about in the real world? I mean who's using this that that's neat. You just showed me a toy program dead program how this? What? What can it really do? Well, first of all, fermion or fermion, as I've discovered they're actually called.

A

I live in spain, so uh great blog post that just came out about shrinking your tiny go webassembly modules that shrink and shrink and keep shrinking until it just disappears into some sort of quantum super position.

A

So cool blog posts just came out, they're doing a lot of really cool stuff and actually they're going to be giving a talk at the end of the day, which I'm really looking forward to so suborbital very cool company, one of the sponsors they've been doing all kinds of interesting things: a recent blog post that just came out from conor hicks talking about a simple serverless system, that's written and, of course it's got. Built-In tiny go support into their command line tools.

A

Then you've been able to use tiny go in envoy and istio for quite some time. This proxy webassembly for proxies project, you'll notice, this very small type, seems appropriate. This sdk is powered by tinygo and does not support the official go compiler, so it's smaller and yet somehow better. In this context, some people are actually running webassembly on physical hardware devices, which I bet you thought is what this talk was about, but it's not so they can actually compile the web assembly into a binary that can be run right on the hardware itself.

A

There's some books about tiny, go tobias, teal contributor to tiny, go an awesome, cool human being, has written an entire book about creative, diy microcontroller projects with tinygo and webassembly.

A

I think I see a pattern forming and then a recent book that I just acquired myself, wassum cooking with golang from philippe who I think might even be here, although we've never met very cool book. Thank you for that all right. But this is not an ad for tiny go. I mean if you haven't been convinced, yet you probably hopefully are, but this is actually a talk about simulating hardware using webassembly.

A

So the way that we do that currently is with the tiny go playground. So if you haven't seen it, the tiny go playground is an actual website on the internets at play.tinygo.org and in the grand tradition of playgrounds.

A

It lets you play with go code or tiny go code there on the internets, and so we can see our exact same program I'll just recompile it by getting rid of the exclamation and it's compiling it, and it will take a little minute because it's actually doing it all in the cloud and so there's my there's, my terminal output, all right, very cool. So, but what about that hardware?

A

So a lot of people have the arduino uno hanging around in the desk drawer or maybe quite a few of them, and so one of the things that we can do is we can actually simulate the hardware itself. So if I go to this arduino blank program, are we doing on time? Okay, we got to keep going so you'll see here. It's got a package main it's importing the machine package, which is a special package used by tinygo for the hardware abstraction layer. So we can actually talk directly to the physical device itself.

A

We've defined our led, which is the built-in led on most boards and then our function main we configure the led for output and then in our forever loop. We say led.low to turn it off. Wait for a second then led high to turn it on and sleep for a second, and you could see on this little rendering here in svg, an arduino uno board with the thing flashing on it.

A

So that's very interesting we, but but tell me about other boards. What are we even seeing? What is this? What is this madness?

A

So when we're running tiny on hardware, we're actually running a native binary, and so when we compile it using tinygo, we compile all of the packages that we would normally be using and we use the machine package as I was showing you to talk directly to the hardware registers we're running bare metal on the physical hardware, and so when we would compile it, we would use the normal, tiny go compiler and say build with our target of arduino and our output being a hex file, which is a standard binary format for flashing firmware.

A

But if we're running using webassembly in our playground, it's very similar. It's still the same compiler, but instead we're using a javascript interface to a webassembly module that we just compiled and we're executing that simulator as a web worker in our browser and we use the same tiny go build command. The difference here is that our output is now awesome binary, but it's otherwise it's exactly the same code.

A

So, let's take a quick look at an arduino or sorry, an a the fruit circuit playground express board, which is actually the same board that I have on gopherbot here and we can take a quick look at how it actually looks it's a board just like this kind of circular, and if we go back to our code here, we can see that it's blinking in exactly the same way. It's exactly the same code.

A

I did not change any of the code, we're using the same hardware, abstraction layer that tinygo provides for this low-level hardware and it's able to blink the built-in led on any of you know 70 somewhat different boards all right. So, but what if we want to actually put that onto some physical hardware?

A

Well by the way, just a quick? How this is working, your program is being compiled using google cloud run in the form of a serverless function through a tiny go running in a container, and then that can be either compiling it to webassembly, as we saw or can actually program and compile the native binary. So if I click on this flash button, it'll actually compile it in the cloud and then it'll download it.

A

B

Go over to, hopefully I will find it, let's see if it made it.

A

It's waiting, there's my firmware dot uf2, which is a universal format for firmware developed cooperatively with microsoft, which lets you just flash different boards.

A

And if we go back to I'm going to double tap my board here, so I can put it in the bootloader mode and then it'll pop up just as a normal mass storage device and I'll drag my firmware onto it and it will flash it and then you can see that it's actually blinking the led on the board.

A

Amazing. We actually just flashed a board from the internet using web assembly built compiled all the way down to the physical board itself. It is real.

A

So, let's do something a little bit fancier. We have support for many different hardware devices that are not just simple leds, for example, rgb leds yeah, we need those. So if I look at the circuit playground express, it actually has a bunch of built-in leds. You probably saw on gopherbot's back, and so this program is very very similar.

A

It uses the standard image color package, the machine package we saw before the time package and then the ws, 2812 or neopixel driver package, which is some external package that we have for talking to all of the different 70. Some odd displays, sensors and other devices that physical actual devices, and so in this case we are configuring, this ws2812 device and we're changing the leds between the red and blue.

A

All right. We put those into the led display and then we every 100 milliseconds, we rotate, and so you can actually see it here. Well, let's do the same thing now, but let's actually program the board.

A

So I'm going to download the firmware, I'm going to jump over here, we'll put it back in the bootloader mode and then we'll drag the newest firmware onto it, and you can see that yes, now we're actually running that new firmware with. So we can do a lot of really interesting things and it's all there allowing you to simulate.

A

It works amazing.

A

You can applaud now.

A

All right, so, if you want to know more about how this is built check out the recent blog post from my colleague, ike van lattum, the original creator of tinygo tinygo preview, how does it work? That's on this url check us out at tinygo.org.

A

You don't need hardware anymore, the hack hardware, you can just do it with the playground check us out on twitter tinygolang, and I thank you very much.

A

I went one minute over sorry. No questions uh see me at the cocktail reception I'll, give you stickers and uh tell you everything you want to know and more. Thank you.