SEPTEMBER 7, 2026

FlinCGo

ESP32C ProgrammingNetworking
View this project on GitHub ↗

FlinCGo (/flɪŋk-ɡoʊ/)

A lightweight observability platform for ESP32 devices with a collector and output interface on Linux PC. FlinCGo allows streaming real-time low-overhead logs and metrics over lossy networks with high throughput while efficiently implementing a custom binary protocol, non-blocking batching, payload encryption, sequence loss tracking and comfortable user experience.

Components

Component Responsibility
Edge (C firmware for ESP32) Batched and encrypted message transmission to a datagram socket without blocking
Collector (Golang software for Linux PC) Datagram ingestion, decryption, sequence loss tracking and output interface

Detailed overviews

For the design and architecture information for each component:

Usage

Edge Library Usage

  1. Include ./edge/main/flincgo.h in your project.
  2. Before initializing the library make sure to configure it (information in the section below)
  3. Call flincgo_init() before using the library functions. You can de-initialize with flincgo_deinit().
  4. You can either play along the message-batching/queuing nature of FlinCGo to send multiple messages in one UDP datagram by using flincgo_queue() or send a single message immediately with flincgo_quicksend(). Also, you can flincgo_flush() the queue manually to not wait for the automatic flushing.

Edge Configuration

  1. FlinCGo expects you to have ESP-IDF set up on your machine and idf.py command available as a prerequisite.
  2. Make sure your working directory is ./edge/. Set your ESP32 MCU as the target.
cd edge
idf.py set-target esp32
  1. Run the following command to access menuconfig:
idf.py menuconfig

After the menuconfig TUI loads, navigate to "FlinCGo Edge Configuration" and fill-in the configurations.

  • Access Point SSID and Password: Your Wi-Fi name and its password (WPA2-PSK).
  • Station Port: The port that the Collector will be listening to
  • Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU): Maximum amount of bytes FlinCGo will accumulate in a queue before automatically flushing them. (Typically between 1400-1500 bytes)
  • **Automatic Flushing Deadline: Deadline (Longest deadline being once in ~49.7 days) counted after first initialization or after every flush before automatically flushing, even if the MTU limit was not hit.
  1. In the same working directory, run the following command to flash the code and watch the FlinCGo logs in case of errors.
idf.py build flash monitor -p [PORT] # PORT is usually /dev/ttyUSB*

Collector usage

(TBD)