What I Did in January

January turned out to be a good time for tidying up my gitHub repos, because it was cold and there was no incentive to travel, and I had to quarantine for a few days in the midst of it (no symptoms, thankfully). As a result, I updated a few things. All of this is going into my connected devices class this semester.

Just enough HTML for Connected Devices – If a device connects to your phone or laptop, you’re going to need to build an interface for it at some point, and the Document Object Model (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) is a quick way to do it. I put together some examples for various ways to do that. Most of this is a thin wrapper around the Mozilla Developer Network pages, with a focus on connecting. A couple of highlights:

MQTT Examples – I’ve been working on this one since last summer in bits and pieces, but now there’s enough there to be useful. All microcontroller examples were written with the Arduino Nano 33 IoT, though any of the WiFi-enabled Arduinos should do the trick. The browser-based stuff is all in p5.js, but I’ll add some plain vanilla JS examples soon. There are some nice GUI tools available now too, like MQTT Explorer and shiftr.io’s desktop broker. My favorite example in this repo is the WebMIDI to MQTT examples.

Websocket Examples – nothing special here, but the topic comes up enough that having a set of examples on hand was something I needed. Easy to compare and contrast Websockets and MQTT now too. A lot of folks don’t know the ArduinoHTTPClient library can also do websockets, so I threw that in.

Pi Recipes – this is an older repo, but I updated it to make it a bit easier to find things. Quite pleased with the timelapse webcam example that Nun Tansrisakul inspired me to write.

WiFi101/WiFiNINA Examples – another older repo, but a bit better organized now, I hope. Moved some things to their own repos when it was merited.

Display Examples – still working on this one, but I got obsessed with making QR code examples from an Arduino, so I wrote something using Richard Moore’s arduino qrcode library, then duplicated it for ePaper, TFT, and OLED screens. Figured it was as good a time as any to put together what experience I have working with screens and microcontrollers.

HID Examples – not prettied up yet, but put together a few more notes on using the HID examples for Arduino.

Node Examples – also not prettied up yet, but added notes for using these on Glitch or on a CLI.