WARDuino

This project is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and is being developed as part of an active research project at the University of Ghent's TOPL lab.

The WARDuino virtual machine is a WebAssembly runtime for microcontrollers, which runs both under the Arduino and ESP-IDF toolchains. The WARDuino project also includes a VS Code extension to use the remote debugging facilities offered by the virtual machine.

Installation | Examples | Run Specification tests | Documentation

Build and Development Instructions

Supported platforms: Linux (Ubuntu), macOS, ESP-IDF, Arduino

The project uses CMake. Quick install looks like this:

git clone --recursive [email protected]:TOPLLab/WARDuino.git
cd WARDuino
mkdir build-emu
cd build-emu
cmake .. -D BUILD_EMULATOR=ON
make

This will build the command-line tool (emulator), which has been tested on both linux and macOS.

The WARDuino VM can be compiled with both the Arduino and ESP-IDF toolchains, and has been extensively tested on different ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers.

Build for ESP-IDF

Before you can compile and flash with ESP-IDF, you must install and enable the toolchain. You also need to disable the watchdog timer:

1. Go to the root folder of the WARDuino repo
2. run idf.py menuconfig
3. Under Component config → ESP System Settings disable the following options:
   • Interrupt watchdog
   • Initialize Task Watchdog Timer on startup
4. Save and quit the menu

Make sure the ESP-IDF tools are enabled, otherwise these steps will not work.

To install the WARDuino with the ESP-IDF toolchain perform the following steps starting from the project root folder:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -D BUILD_ESP=ON
make flash

Or simply run idf.py flash.

Build for Arduino

First, install the arduino-cli.

Second, create the config file:

arduino-cli config init

If you need additional boards, such as the esp32 boards, you can add them in the generated config file. More information here.

Thirdly, make sure you install the PubSubClient and Adafruit NeoPixel library. (used for MQTT and pixel primitives)

arduino-cli lib install "PubSubClient"
arduino-cli lib install "Adafruit NeoPixel"

After this initial installation steps you can start using WARDuino with the Arduino toolchain. You can upload the example file as follows, starting from the project root:

cd platforms/Arduino
make compile
make flash

Build for Emulator

WARDuino can also be build as a command-line tool for a desktop environment. The purpose of this CLI is to allow developers to test WARDuino applications without the need to buy a microcontroller. The CLI is also used to run the various unit and specification tests for WARDuino.

To install the CLI perform the following steps starting from the project root folder:

mkdir build-emu
cd build-emu
cmake .. -D BUILD_EMULATOR=ON
make

WebAssembly Specification tests

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
./tests/integration/run_spec_tests.py --interpreter "build-emu/wdcli" --compiler "wat2wasm"

Technical support and feedback

For a feature request or bug report, create a GitHub issue.

LICENCE

WARDuino by Robbert Gurdeep Singh, Tom Lauwaerts, Christophe Scholliers and Joel Martin is licensed under a MPL-2.0 License. This is a derivative work of kanaka/wac by Joel Martin.

If you need to cite WARDuino in your research, use:

@inproceedings{WARDuino2019,
 author = {Gurdeep Singh, Robbert and Scholliers, Christophe},
 title = {WARDuino: A Dynamic WebAssembly Virtual Machine for Programming Microcontrollers},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes},
 series = {MPLR 2019},
 year = {2019},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-6977-0},
 location = {Athens, Greece},
 pages = {27--36},
 numpages = {10},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3357390.3361029},
 doi = {10.1145/3357390.3361029},
 acmid = {3361029},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {Arduino, Live Code Updates, Virtual Machine, WebAssembly},
}