Over spring break, we let the Arduinos quietly send data to the internet. I happened to be on the floor every day so I was monitoring my project and its environment. I was also monitoring MQTT Explorer, looking for messages from both my Arduinos and the data that we collected over the week paints a clearer picture of what was going on.
Looking at the data, I realized that because my two Arduinos were both sending heartbeat messages at the same rate, the data should have been alternating messages between them, switching from fireflie01 and fireflie02. This was the case for some very short intervals, but usually just one of the Arduinos was sending a message. Not sure why!
Also, having been on the floor last week, I know that Rob was cutting aluminum pipe which was very loud and also triggered the mic in my project. This goes back to Tom's point about someone yelling next to the project. Someone suggested that I try to isolate the exact frequency of the sound of a vote, which seems like a good idea but I'm not sure how feasible that would be.
At the end of the day (week) I ended up with a project that explored different ways of counting. Ultimately, I don't think this was the best project for this exercise because it was living on the floor with at at least 4 other projects sending data from the same network, the readings were generally infrequent and the data didn't show much change over time, and there was nobody around over the break to interact with it!
That being said, I thought Priyanka's project was successful because they were able to compile enough data in any moment across time to exhibit change. Their connectivity was also successful, and I would like to try to make a simple project that collects data that can live at home and send data successfully over MQTT.
I wish I had more time/resources to figure out the RTC and actually figure out a better way to get data to the broker. My dashboard, at some point, broke(?) or something's wrong with the connection because my messages weren't getting through.
Taking a step back, I am fairly happy with the way this project came out for the purpose of my thesis on kinetic circuits. Over the break I went back to fetch and was able to organize my data from both Arduinos so that a vote triggers a video to pop up in TouchDesigner. I'm hoping to install this next week for Alumni Feedback Day and at an upcoming thesis project exhibition where there will be more people to interact with it.