I have been a fan of the audio programming language Chuck ever since i came across it few months ago. Its used by the Laptop Orchestras from the Princeton University and Stanford. For tinkerers like us its a wonderful tool to mix the hardware hacking with computer synthesized sound. I can’t play any instruments. But i can code. I understand math. This tool frees me to apply my programming skills to create new sounds. So i set out to combine MQTT, Processing and Chuck.
While waiting for my Arduino Yun to arrive for my WiFi Christmas Tree project, I decided to complete as many software components as possible. I had already setup a local MQTT broker and bridge. Now I am planning to use my PC and Mac for all the music and sound generation. They will act as MQTT subscribers. I will be running Processing sketches on the PC. So I decided to setup MQTT Client Libraries on Processing.
As I mentioned in the Interactive WiFi Christmas Tree introduction, I am waiting for parts to arrive from element14. Meanwhile I started to set up my MQTT infrastructure. My initial plan was to use the sandboxed MQTT Broker available at iot.eclipse.org at port 1883. Then I decided to explore more about the MQTT Broker and wanted to setup a local MQTT Broker on my PC and use it as the MQTT gateway for all my needs. After further research i ended up choosing the mosquitto broker. Since the Mosquitto broker allows bridging, it should be possible for me to selectively choose “topics” to forward to one or more of sandboxes available on the internet.
In Dec 2014, I was one of the finalist for the Holiday Lights Road Test challenge conducted by element14.com.I chose to build an Interactive WiFi Christmas Tree . I wrote several blog posts on element14.com to share my build process with the community. I am cross posting most of those blogs from element14.com to my blog. The following is the introductory post for what my project is about.