Lesson 4 - Water-Monitor/IoT-Portfolio-FJS GitHub Wiki

This lesson we worked on:

• Presentations Busses
• Introduction Node Red
• Introduction MQTT
• Simulate an AC over MQTT

Reflection Stijn

In my opinion we did not have a lot of time to do research about busses. I rather had got the information directly from Ulrich or had got more time for it. I prefer to have had it from the teacher. At the end, I did not have a lot of information and still a lot of questionmarks. Most of the presentation was based on Fadis research, since he managed to find way more information and had a way more clear understanding of it. I think if Fadi would have done it alone, he would have had exactly the same outcome, because I did almost not contribute to it. When we had to make a presentation in a couple of minutes, it became a big mess and I am definitely not proud of it.

The introduction of Node-Red was really nice! I love it! I have always looked down on those type of languages, but I totally come back on that. It is really cool. In my opinion Node-Red is a very easy and nice tool to work in. It is very friendly for those who have not much or no knowledge of coding. It gives a lot of freedom to focus more on the hardware part, since the software part does not cost that much time. The only thing that was holding me back in the lesson, was the fact that I did not understand the exercise. It confused me a lot and it took me a lot of time before I finaly understood what I was supposed to do.

It gives me a lot of joy when I see that a sensor (or mocked sensor or software code) reacts on another sensor by MQTT. In my opinion MQTT or messaging frameworks in general are amazing. Just messing with the consoles and sending messages on topics makes me really excited.

Reflection Fadi

We learnd about the buses system prep, which was interesting, where we got to learn whats in the bluebox.

Going through the Low Level Busses, was also interesting to know the speeds, lenght and wiring of some Low Level Buses. Going through the exchange formats, This was also an intresting topic were we learnt diffrent kinds of exchange formats, and wich was the most sufficent. Testing out node-red with buttons, charts , injection etc, This part was new for me, I had a bit hard time learning this and understad the logic. Its getting better. It was nice to get it to work but we did not finish the software part. Next day we worked togheter me, stijn and Johanna and solved it. I got the ide of having a If-statment to see if the input tempurture is below 30 or 10, Stijn made the codeing part and solved that. Johanna looked did build the wildcards for the software part.

Reflection Johanna

Eventhough we tried to speed up time with the busses, it felt more like wasting too much time on one single topic. I did learn a lot about busses though (e.g. that one-wire has actually two wires and that iButton exists)! I am also not completely sure, were we used this knowledge in the whole module. It was a bit of sad, that this was the last lesson together with the south africans.

Like the others, I enjoyed the introductions to node-red, but I am still not quite sure, how the connections works or how it is possible that we all work on the same 'flow'.

MQTT seemed a bit confusing for me in the beginning as well but after a few attempts it was quite easy to use.