Overview:

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:

  1. Installation
  2. Led Blinker as a first application
  3. A Counter as a second application
  4. The Sense application
  5. Using the radio

Please note that the first 3 tutorials do not show the benefits of FlowTalk. Usage of co-routine is applied only from the fourth tutorial.

Slides about FlowTalk



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