Lua Fibre-optic Christmas Tree

In 1998, I was given a fibre optic christmas tree, lit by two coloured light bulbs powered by 2 x AA batteries. In the intervening years, the electrics broke. Finally today I got round to doing something about it.

The tree now has a bunch of neopixels where the bulbs used to be, and an ESP8266 microcontroller providing the flashing (as well as a Wifi/telnet accessible Lua command prompt).

Unfortunately, I can't see much of a different between the illumination provided by the seven pixels - I was hoping that each one would light the fibres up very differently, but that hasn't turned out to be the case. No big deal though, and maybe more optical isolation between the different LEDs and the base of the fibre bundle would help.

Interestingly, the fibres manage to project an image of the layout of the LEDs on the board (see link above) onto the wall behind the tree! and all the fibres emit a very slight blue light because there's a blue LED on the controller board.

Coroutines and first order functions to flash an LED on an ESP8266

The Adafruit tutorial for flashing an LED using Lua on an ESP8266 is buggy: The main loop does not yield to the underlying operating system, and instead hogs the CPU causing eventual crash - usually after about 10 seconds for me.

Here's the code reproduced from the tutorial:

    while 1 do
    gpio.write(3, gpio.HIGH)
    tmr.delay(1000000) -- waits a second, without allowing OS to run
    gpio.write(3, gpio.LOW)
    tmr.delay(1000000) -- and again
    end

The NodeMCU people advocate using a node.js async callback style, where instead of delaying your thread, you would instead set an alarm for a callback to do the next thing. Using tmr.delay and looping a lot is strongly discouraged because it upsets the OS.

I hate that callback style of coding (for reasons).

Lua has co-routines, though, apparently because people wanted to do things like write scripts that kept yielding back to a game engine and then resuming. (See this history of Lua)

I've recently been playing with effect systems in Haskell (see blog tag extensible-effects) and realised that Lua co-routines provide enough infrastructure for (some of) this.

So I hacked up a prototype.

The "user program" looks very much like the Adafruit example:

flashDelay = 200 -- ms
function flasher()
  while 1 do
    gpio.write(3, gpio.HIGH)
    coroutine.yield(flashDelay)
    gpio.write(3, gpio.LOW)
    coroutine.yield(flashDelay)
  end
end

and can be run like this;

driveCoroutineGood(flasher)

You can also use driveCoroutineBad which uses the blocking tmr.delay instead of the asynchronous tmr.alarm, and get the same ESP-crashing behaviour as the original example.

The main difference is that calls to tmr.delay are replaced by a call to yield. In effect system language, that means the code is asking the effect handler (driveCoroutineGood or driveCoroutineBad) to perform an effect (to delay by the appropriate time) rather than performing the effect itself. How that actually happens is down to the effect handler: in the bad case, just calls tmr.delay; and in the good case, does all the wrapping up of callbacks for tmr.alarm.

This ends up looking almost identical to the code in this GitHub issue, tmr.delay() is synchronous and blocks the network stack.

On a very simple example, this is a bit overkill, but on a bigger example is probably more interesting: you can call coroutine.yield deep down inside a whole stack of functions, which becomes tangly if you're trying to build this manually as an async callback.

Other callback style stuff is hopefully amenable to this - for example, socket handling.