IN/Clojure 2020

Lighting up a LED, the hello world of embedded programming. A simple yet empowering feat, the feeling of pushing the boundaries of the abstract world of coding and actually causing direct action on the real world. This talk will embark you on a unique journey of applying the power of Clojure to building connected objectsplenty. Traditionally, entering the realm of the Internet of Things from the Java world has been painful. However, times have changed. Installing an optimized JVM on a Raspberry Pi need not to be cumbersome anymore. Linux APIs are growing for all sorts of IO. Do not just focus on small objects. What would happen if you could harness all this power from the REPL? While enjoying the rest of the Clojure ecosystem you like and love? Could it be that Clojure is actually a viable choice for the Internet of Things?

Outline

• Introduction, how Clojure is severly under-represented for IoT
• Presenting microcontrollers, limitations
• Presenting (nano)computers, our focus
• Installing a JVM and Clojure on an ARM device
• Using General-Purpose Input/Output
  • Complete example, demonstration using a Raspberry Pi
  • Challenges, how it works under the hood, how we got there
  • Demonstrating the importance of leveraging Linux
• Offloading IO work to other devices
• Various protocols for talking to sensors and various machines
  • Using GPIO itself
  • I2C
  • SPI
  • UART (“serial port”)
  • Handling specific protocols (eg. Meter-bus)
  • Converters between protocols, specially when no hardware support
• LAN/WAN, the internet, focus on the MQTT protocol
• How nothing restricts us to nanocomputers
• A hint for building a connected factory using Programmable Logic Controllers, Modbus, and Clojure
• Summary

Speaker bio

Former illusionist, a bit of a pianist, now a psychologist. Also a hammock philosopher and tamer of electrons. After studying neuroscience, Adam Helinski became a full-time parens whisperer in the kingdom of IoT where his slight sense of scientific madness lead him to the unique choice of using Clojure for prototyping connected devices. After those few years of exile away from psychology, he now would like to experiment with using Clojure in psychotherapy.

Links

• https://github.com/dvlopt