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The time for battery-free computing is now. Lithium mining depletes and pollutes local water supplies and dead batteries in landfills leak toxic metals into the ground. Battery-free devices represent a probable future for sustainable ubiquitous computing and we will need many more new devices and programmers to bring that future into reality. Yet, energy harvesting and battery-free devices that frequently fail are challenging to program. The maker movement has organically developed a considerable variety of platforms to prototype and program ubiquitous sensing and computing devices, but only a few have been modified to be usable with energy harvesting and to hide those pesky power failures that are the norm from variable energy availability (platforms like Microsoft's Makecode and AdaFruit's CircuitPython). Many platforms, especially Arduino (the first and most famous maker platform), do not support energy harvesting devices and intermittent computing. To bridge this gap and lay a strong foundation for potential new platforms for maker programming, we build a tool called BOOTHAMMER: a lightweight assembly re-writer for ARM Thumb. BOOTHAMMER analyzes and rewrites the low-level assembly to insert careful checkpoint and restore operations to enable programs to persist through power failures. The approach is easily insertable in existing toolchains and is general-purpose enough to be resilient to future platforms and devices/chipsets. We close the loop with the user by designing a small set of program annotations that any maker coder can use to provide extra information to this low-level tool that will significantly increase checkpoint efficiency and resolution. These optional extensions represent a way to include the user in decision-making about energy harvesting while ensuring the tool supports existing platforms. We conduct an extensive evaluation using various program benchmarks with Arduino as our chosen evaluation platform. We also demonstrate the usability of this approach by evaluating BOOTHAMMER with a user study and show that makers feel very confident in their ability to write intermittent computing programs using this tool. With this new tool, we enable maker hardware and software for sustainable, energy-harvesting-based computing for all.
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Battery-free MakeCode: Accessible Programming for Intermittent Computing
Hands-on computing has emerged as an exciting and accessible way to learn about computing and engineering in the physical world for students and makers of all ages. Current end-to-end approaches like Microsoft MakeCode require tethered or battery-powered devices like a micro:bit, limiting usefulness and applicability, as well as abdicating responsibility for teaching sustainable practices. Unfortunately, energy harvesting computing devices are usually only programmable by experts and require significant supporting toolchains and knowledge across multiple engineering and computing disciplines to work effectively. This paper bridges the gap between sustainable computing efforts, the maker movement, and novice-focused programming environments with MakeCode-Iceberg, a set of compiler extensions to Microsoft's open-source MakeCode project. The extensions automatically and invisibly transform user code in any language supported (Blocks, JavaScript, Python)into a version that can safely and correctly execute across intermittent power failures caused by unreliable energy harvesting. Determining where, when, and what to save in a checkpoint on limited energy, time, and hardware budget is challenging. We leverage the unique intermediate representation of the MakeCode source-to-source compiler to design and deploy various checkpointing techniques. Our approach allows us to provide, for the first time, a fully web-based and toolchain-free environment to program intermittent computing devices, making battery-free operation accessible to all. We demonstrate new use cases with multiple energy harvesters, peripherals, and application domains: including a Smart Terrarium, Step Counter, and Combination Lock. MakeCode-Iceberg provides sustainable hands-on computing opportunities to a broad audience of makers and learners, democratizing access to energy harvesting and battery-free embedded systems.
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- PAR ID:
- 10379266
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 35
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3517236
