Wireless sensor networks necessitate a programming model different from the one used to develop desktop applications. Typically, resources are constrained in terms of power consumption and memory usage. C is the most common programming language used to develop applications on very small embedded sensor devices. The difficulty of maintaining and porting applications written in C between different platforms is well known. We claim that C does not provide efficient mechanisms to face the implicit asynchronous nature of sensor sampling. C applications for these devices suffer from a disruption in their control flow.
FlowTalk is a new programming language aimed at making software development for wireless embedded sensor devices easier. FlowTalk is a Smalltalk dialect, a dynamically typed object-oriented programming language. It has a similar syntax to Smalltalk, however its dynamicity has been traded for a reduction in power consumption. The event mechanism that traditionally comes when using sensors is replaced in FlowTalk with a mechanism called controlled disruption. FlowTalk is built for TinyOS and can be used to develop applications that can fit in 4 kB of memory for a large number of wireless sensor devices.
Screenshots:
Tutorials:
A list of tutorials are available:
- Installation
- Led Blinker as a first application
- A Counter as a second application
- The Sense application
- Using the radio
Download:
- MacOSX version
- Windows version
- Linux version