Thu. Feb 18, 2021, 10:30AM to 12:20PM (Zoom)

Today’s class is primarily devoted to hands-on learning.

Warm-up

  1. Brief check-in.
  2. Any questions?

Administrative

  1. Tuesday Feb 23 is an official break day, we meet again in a week.
  2. Garth has added additional office hours Friday and Tuesday.

Assignment 5 Review

Let’s take a few minutes to discuss your progress on Assignment 5.

  1. What features and techniques did you try out?
  2. Did you get stuck trying to figure anything out?
  3. What was the most surprising discovery?

MQTT

Our telematics experiments will be conducted via an MQTT server run by IDeATe. This is a popular system for lightweight communication in the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) world. It is designed for telemetry so is suitable for the type of individual sensors and actuator commands we’ll use, but doesn’t scale up to audio or video.

The general plan:

  • Set up and run a MQTT program on everyone’s regular computer.
  • Test sending short messages back and forth from the keyboard.
  • Run the Remote Touch sketch on everyone’s Bluefruit.
  • Connect the MQTT program to the Bluefruit data.
  • Set up some possible telematic scenarios:
    • one person broadcasts a touch to many
    • many send their touches to one
    • pairs mutually exchange touches
    • pass touches around a ring
  • Invent some kind of game or social activity around this new resource.

Downloads

There are two ways to run the qt_arduino_mqtt_bridge application: as a Python script using the Python 3.8 interpreter we asked you to install, or as a standalone program. Here is where to find each:

Next Steps

Coming soon: a few more remote code samples.

Assignment 6