#protocol buffers

ESP32 Protocol buffers: Encoding a DS18B20 temperature measurement

In this tutorial we will check how to obtain a measurement from the DS18B20 temperature sensor and encode it using protocol buffers. We will be using the ESP32 and the Arduino core. The tests were performed using a DFRobot’s ESP32 module integrated in a ESP32 development board and a waterproof version of the sensor.

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Why use FlatBuffers?

Access to serialized data without parsing/unpacking

Memory efficiency and speed

Flexible 

Tiny code footprint

Strongly typed

Cross platform code with no dependencies

But all the cool kids use JSON!

JSON is very readable (which is why we use it as our optional text format) and very convenient when used together with dynamically typed languages (such as JavaScript). When serializing data from statically typed languages, however, JSON not only has the obvious drawback of runtime inefficiency, but also forces you to write more code to access data (counterintuitively) due to its dynamic-typing serialization system. In this context, it is only a better choice for systems that have very little to no information ahead of time about what data needs to be stored.

Who uses FlatBuffers?

Cocos2d-x, the #1 open source mobile game engine, uses it to serialize all their game data.

Facebook uses it for client-server communication in their Android app. They have a nice article explaining how it speeds up loading their posts.

gRPC is basically Google's official RPC implementation for Protocol Buffers (in particular for proto3), but released as a separate project.

Building on the HTTP/2 standard brings many capabilities such as bidirectional streaming, flow control, header compression, multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection and more. These features save battery life and data usage on mobile devices while speeding up services and web applications running in the cloud.