Davide Bettio is a long-time open source enthusiast. Passionate about embedded systems since high school, he also contributed early on to KDE. In 2017, he created AtomVM to run Elixir and Erlang on tiny microcontrollers with only a few kilobytes of RAM. Today, he is working full-time on AtomVM. When he’s not coding, Davide enjoys hiking in the Alps.
AtomVM makes it possible to run Erlang, Elixir and Gleam on tiny, resource constrained devices by executing bytecode from compiled .beam files on supported targets, while remaining a separate VM from the traditional BEAM.
In this talk, I will show why AtomVM can be a great fit for building wireless sensors: you can write small firmware that reads real sensor hardware, structure the application using the tools we already love, and then deliver data where it matters.
We will look at practical wireless delivery options that fit real deployments, for example long range LoRa for field data collection, or Wi-Fi for publishing data to a broker using MQTT or for home automation, focusing on what is feasible on AtomVM and what trade offs you should expect.
To keep things grounded, I will walk through a working end to end example of a small sensor node, showing how to go from reading a sensor to data arriving somewhere useful.
Talk objectives: