Work’s been quite busy lately, with several things going on at once, and few things completed. Many pieces of what I am doing are scattered over the web, on my gitHub account, my various class sites, etc. Since I’m expecting students to keep a blog in my classes, I thought it might be useful to revive my own blogs as a place to keep track of some of the projects I’m in the midst of.
I’ve been having a good time making examples using the Message Queueing Telemetry Transfer (MQTT) protocol lately. MQTT is a lightweight networking protocol used in many industrial networking (read: internet of things) applications. There are a number of good libraries out there for it on a variety of platforms, and a couple of useful public brokers (read: servers) that you can test your apps with, like shiftr.io and mosquitto.org. I like Shiftr because of the fancy motion graphic (okay, call me shallow). I’ve got examples for Arduino using the ArduinoMqttClient library and p5.js using the Eclipse PAHO library. I just added one using p5.serialport as well, so you can connect Arduino projects to each other through p5.serialport -> p5.js -> MQTT.