intltechventures.blogspot.com: 2021-05-30 Saturday: Book Review - Creative DIY Microcontroller Projects with TinyGo and WebAssembly

Sunday, May 30, 2021

2021-05-30 Saturday: Book Review - Creative DIY Microcontroller Projects with TinyGo and WebAssembly

Creative DIY Microcontroller Projects with TinyGo and WebAssembly

A practical guide to building embedded applications for low-powered devices, IoT, and home automation

https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Microcontroller-Projects-TinyGo-WebAssembly/dp/1800560206/

Published: May 14, 2021, 322 pages

By Tobias Theel, Lead Software Engineer with ClariLab

Caveat: Teny Thomas (Marketing Coordinator at PacktPublishing) graciously provided me with an eBook copy to review.

My Amazon Review Headline: Crisp, Concise, Well-Written - Focused on Building Practical Hands-on Skill and Knowledge

Things I Liked About This Book:

There is no fluff in this book – the writing is crisp, clear, concise, and packed with interesting hands-on exercises. For a technologist who wishes to begin their exploration of micro-controller programming - it is highly entertaining - and informative. Highly recommended.
This book was a fun read. Although it focuses on hardware aspects that are outside of my normal day-to-day professional work – it opened new doors for me to new insights and knowledge that expands my breadth of awareness – which I can integrate and use to elevate my understanding of many other practical problems in both my professional and personal domains of interest.
The accompanying github and Code In Action YouTube videos.
The book is focused on immediately developing knowledge and skills.
The project/coding examples are interesting – and extensible to other types of projects.
The example of writing a driver for a servomotor.
Controlling devices.
Writing a library for a sensor, and reading data from a sensor.
The environment/tooling setup instructions in the first chapter covered several different scenarios.
The discussions of the differences/benefits between different Arduino device specs.
Understanding the purpose and use/fit of the SPI and I2C interfaces.
The building of the reader’s knowledge to tackle a practical and interesting Internet of Things (IoT) type project – that also incorporates Wi-Fi and an MQTT broker to demonstrate pub/sub event handling.
The writer gently takes the reader by the hand – and guides them step-by-step. Even a hobbyist/neophyte programmer should be able to enjoy working through the well-written instructions for the projects.
The inclusion of the Questions section at the end of each chapter – providing further stimulus for the reader to develop further confidence in the knowledge they have just gained.
The author has managed to maintain a keen balance of information imparted, pace of interesting hands-on exercises – without becoming mired in minutiae. Yet, there are subtle but important points that the author calls out – so that the neophyte is well advised to consider additional concerns that are beyond the scope of the book (e.g., security, encrypted communications, authentication).
I am keenly interested in practical applications of both Go and Wasm. Learning more about TinyGo was also of interest. The book is written for Go 1.15 and newer releases.
I have a number of personal automation projects I would like to develop (many related to my 1963 35 ft. Pearson Alberg sailboat) – but my knowledge of microcontrollers is very limited. This book provides many practical examples that I feel will give me the practical hands-on foundations from which to explore further on my own.

Chapters:

1 – Getting Started with TinyGo

2 – Building a Traffic Lights Control System

3 – Building a Safety Lock Using a Keypad

4 – Building a Plant Watering System

5 – Building a Touchless Handwash Timer

6 – Building Displays for Communication using I2C and SPI Interfaces

7 – Displaying Weather Alerts on the TinyGo Wasm Dashboard

8 – Automating and Monitoring Your Home Through the TinyGo Wasm Dashboard