In my previous two articles I had shown how to run PowerFx on Raspberry Pi and even how to shell script it on Linux. But till then it was quite still limited to its existing functions that came with it, which although great, doesn’t do much when it comes to actually use Raspberry Pi and its accessories to do IoT stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I had this cool gadget called Sense Hat<\/a> lying around and I wondered if it was possible to extend the functions of PowerFx to actually communicate with this Sense Hat and read telemetry data of it such as temperature, pressure, magnistim, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no shortage of libraries to do exactly this, but none of those, as far as I’m aware, are low code! Which would be brilliant if I could pull this off. Because wouldn’t it be awesome to use low code, easy to understand, Excel formulas to do something as intricate as reading sensor data and controlling Iot hardware?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to build this I would need to extend PowerFx source code to have new functions to talk to SenseHat to read data or do stuff, like printing messages on its Led Matrix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It so happens that there was no released documentation yet to detail how to do this, however I did learn from the great lads at Microsoft that there is actually a way to add helper functions to PowerFx to extend its features and that is actually how the Help() function does work in the REPL Console sample.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So after some code eyeballing to understand the implementation of it, I figured out how to add new functions to PowerFx, which once you understand it you got to appreciate its brilliance as it makes it possible to add new functions to PowerFx without having to rebuild and redeploy the Core Library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to run the code in this article you will need .net core installed and configured on your Raspi. If not, check my previous article on this.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n