The Internet of Things has arrived at Aquarian

At the end of the summer 2024, the direction of my life changed forever. I learned that the City of Albuquerque together with Central New Mexico Community College was going to be opening up another round of the Internet of Things Bootcamp to Artists in Residence. Normally available as a class to college students, this full-time, 9-5 engineering and design class provided introductory-level instruction in C++ language, microcontrollers, sensors, trigonometry, electricity, connection types, 3D printing and modeling, laser cutting, solar panels, and communication technologies (MQTT, LoRA, Zigby) that would enable all these things to talk to each other. As an Artist Residency, the opportunity was paid for by the city while involving an exhibition opportunity. This made the opportunity tangible for working artists (and agency leads) and competitive. I was one of six artists to get in.

Computer Fundamentals, 3D Design, Internet Expansion

Every day of this 13 week course was packed full of tangible knowledge that I had never learned, despite my proximity to computers. I finally learned what Binary was, and how it worked directly with electrons to create what we know as computing and data. I worked with piezo sensors, hall effect sensors, IR distance sensors, soil moisture sensors, BME 280, load sensors, and more and learned how they did the same. I mastered LED's, soldering, breadboard prototyping, resistors, relays, servos & stepper motors. We had self-driven video lessons on 3D modeling on Onshape, a program I still use today. We built and tested devices that communicated to Hue light bulbs, dashboards, and received data from buttons and other sensors. I built a cuckoo clock, a plant auto-watering contraption (complete with Water Me Now buttons on the internet) and a barbie-sized concept of a reactive, human sized light panel I call Livelights. This served as my capstone project, which was able to function without a direct power source in the exhibition.

During this commitment, Niki and Demetria held down the business end of things. Niki lead meetings, projects, proposals, and work - and I jumped in every other week as usual for project updates and direction. It's said that the business only has strength if it can operate without its owner, and for 3 months, October - December, I was essentially out-of-pocket. Hats off to my wonderful team for their contributions.

Starting with MQTT

Now that I fancy myself as much of a 3D artist, efficiency engineer, or even strategic physical business planner as much as an agency lead, it looks like I cornered myself out of my former specialty. Not so fast! There is a missing link between Craft CMS, ExpressionEngine and IOT - a communication protocol. The standard for this is MQTT, which you can think of as a type of hypertext transfer protocol (http) for machines. While Aquarian can (and has) create an MQTT broker on the web for our private use, there was no existing provision for using our existing backend technology to connect with our microcontrollers. For this reason, we connected to Lindsy DiLoretto at Double Secret Agency to see if he could help us develop an MQTT communication add-on for Craft CMS. After a bit of back-and-forth, we agreed that with a little AI help, his pre-existing plugin, Notifier, normally a vehicle to shuttle high-stakes emails from the website based on actions taken by editors and so-forth, could envelop MQTT as a notification type and take advantage of Notifier's already-plentiful "hooks" (opportunities to trigger messages,) and do even more right out of the gate.

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Designing for an expanded web

It's one thing to design and develop websites as a hub for communication and marketing content. It's another thing entirely to take that ability to things other than websites and email -  for the website to serve as a hub for all things information, or even to provide a convenient dashboard to drive lights, mechanical processes, or automations. We are working on designing engaging lights, informational dashboards, and useful value-adds with 3D modeling, web design, electricity, and light.

We are modeling 3D objects of our own design and printing our designs on a Bambu x1 Carbon 3D printer, making them work with microcontrollers, sensors and lights, and devising plans to keep them charged and off the grid, while maintaining WIFI connectivity and communicate over MQTT. It's more than turning on the lights when the door opens, or comparing temperatures in the house (which we're going to do to get started, by the way;) it's creating intelligent, at-your-fingers convenience and interesting beauty in as many places as possible. It's finally bringing the Art to the practice of Web, which we have been here for all along.