Awk driven IoT

https://anisse.astier.eu/awk-driven-iot.html

by Aissen • 9 years ago

181 31 9 years ago

anisse.astier.eu

DroidX86• 9 years ago

This is awesome!

bcook2• 9 years ago

Why, exactly?

Annatar• 9 years ago

Because it's using a 41 year old language which has ultra low memory requirements, no dependencies and runs like a bandit, on internet of things. (And can be compiled to machine code by using Awka.)

In Bryan Cantrill's (paraphrased) words: "let there be an orgy of AWK one-liners!"

(Or even better, entire applications written in AWK, since the language is perfect for dynamically generating web applications.)

hilti3• 9 years ago

Awesome project!

There's a company who developed a cute product around this type of technology. It's a bestselling toy in Germany.

https://tonies.de

_pmf_• 9 years ago

It's a bestselling toy in Germany.

German here; never heard of it, but looks amazing for my daughter. Thanks for mentioning this!

adrianN• 9 years ago

Tape cassettes are a dime a dozen whereas you pay 15€ for a story tonie. Inserting a cassette and pressing play is also not too difficult for a child.

hilti3• 9 years ago

My kids love it and highly recommend it. I never heard of it before until last XMAS.

Aissen• 9 years ago

Wow, op here, I had never heard about tonies ! It seems to be exactly the same concept, awesome ! It seems good ideas happen at the same time :-)

gingerlime2• 9 years ago

Really cool project. I'm already using mpd on my rpi to play music (controlled with the iPhone mPod app).

Would be cool to let my 3.5yr old boy play some songs he likes... But at his age, I need to think of a more advanced physical controller or remote (any suggestions?)

netsharc2• 9 years ago

Amazon Dash is a one-button solution, if he can't press buttons yet you just need to hack it so another action triggers the "button press" event.

azinman2• 9 years ago

They have like a 4 second latency, which would be tough for a child.

gingerlime2• 9 years ago

But how can he choose different tunes? Hope to find some kind of controller that's fun for him to use.

... and of course he can press a button :)

nprescott• 9 years ago

I'm reminded of two other surprising uses of Awk -- "Awk for AI"[0] and "awk-raycaster"[1]

I really like Awk as a language because it integrates so well with shell pipelines and it is incredibly small, while remaining high-level enough to be practical, which I think this project demonstrates quite well.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140926113347/http://www.wra1th...

[1] https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster

tannhaeuser2• 9 years ago

Awk is already well-known in embedded systems, eg. busybox implements a lot of POSIX using awk IMO.

Also, awk syntax is clearly the predecessor of JavaScript. The following is both awk and JavaScript:

    function f(x) {
        my_array[1] = "whatever"
        my_array["a string"] = "something else"
        if (x in my_array) return my_array[x] 
    }

It's all there: the "in" operator, no need for semicolon as statement terminator, the "function" keyword, untypedness, regular expression constants, C-like curly braces, etc.

chubot• 9 years ago

Yeah Awk and JavaScript have surprisingly similar syntax. But the semantics are very different. Here are some things I found when studying Awk a bit more:

- Awk has no local variables! There is no "var". Believe it or not, people fake locals with unused function parameters.

- Awk has no dict literals like d={}. And no function literals like f = function(x) { return x; }

- Awk dicts can't be nested. You can't have something like: {key1: {key2: 123}} (using JS syntax)

- Awk CAN accept dicts as parameters, but it CAN'T return them. "return d" is invalid.

- Awk can't take functions as parameters OR return them. That is, no higher order functions.

The latter three facts are basically consequences of the fact that Awk has no garbage collection. It has a strict stack discipline and no nested compound data structures.

tannhaeuser2• 9 years ago

Yes, and another difference is the use of 1-based string indexes, as opposed to 0-based string indexes in JavaScript. Even though I started with C many years ago (where 0-based string indexes are there for a reason, unlike in Java and JavaScript IMHO), I found 1-based string index semantics to allow much more compact and idiomatic expressions for typical string massaging tasks.

stephengillie• 9 years ago

Add in dollar signs before the variables and you very nearly have valid Powershell as well.

It's all there: the "in" operator, no need for semicolon as statement terminator, the "function" keyword, untypedness, regular expression constants, C-like curly braces, etc

At some point, these polyglots must merge. It makes no sense to have arbitrary particles be the only distinction between languages.

krick• 9 years ago

Is there any downside to using JS instead of Awk for one-line shell scripting? Maybe it's time to retire Awk, and use js/Perl/whatever instead for that purpose?

kiwidrew• 9 years ago

busybox implements a lot of POSIX using awk

Citation, please?

It looks like busybox implements the 'dos2unix', 'tac', and 'unix2dos' commands as shell scripts that call 'sed'. And there are a couple of awk scripts (e.g. 'scripts/checkhelp.awk') that are used during the busybox build process. But as far as I can tell, all of the actual busybox applets are written in plain C.

I'd love to be wrong on this point, however -- I think that implementing a full POSIX userspace with just /bin/sh and /bin/awk is an awesome idea!

staticvar• 9 years ago

Love it! I worked on a research project where we built a lot of CLIs to pull data form a sensor, send it over a Unix Pipe to a push CLI for a database. It offers some fun flexibility and really fast implementations.

http://openpipekit.github.io/

srean• 9 years ago

The article mentions mawk which is one of the faster awks I know of. Then there is awka that compiles awk script to C. Do you know of other speed demons apart from these. I think cleaning up the language by removing some of the one-off constructs and making it more regular (npi) could make faster implementations possible. An embeddable/extendable awk that exploits simd and multicore could potentially lift a lot of weight.

I wish awk had more mind share than it does these days.

js2• 9 years ago

Somewhat gratuitous use of awk. It could be bash driven IoT:

   ... | while read -r line; do
   file=
   case "$line" in
     *"03 52 c1 1a"*) echo "file1 "; file="file1.mp3" ;;
   esac
   if test -n "$file"; then
     mpg321 -q "$file" &
   fi
   done

thisrod• 9 years ago

I've been using AWK for decades, but the NFC avatars are new to me.

Has anyone started a business where you send in some photos, or sit for a sculptor, then they 3D print a set of NFC caricatures for you? I imagine it would be fairly easy to do, especially if the sculpture tutor at your local art school was willing to help with hiring.

fundabulousrIII• 9 years ago

Now really do an inet aware interface with (g)awk: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawkinet/html_node/.

Awk driven IoT

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