This week I focused on our ethics assignment and setting up our communication. The exercise on ethics was helpful and we received a lot of good feedback on our project about issues that we hadn’t considered before. Specifically, knowing the location of people in a room can give an adversary ability to do more harm.
Setting up our devices on CMU-DEVICE wifi proved to be a little more challenging than expected. This set us a little behind schedule but I think we are still on track as this week I successfully registered and connected all of our ESP8266 microcontrollers to CMU-DEVICE as well as the Raspberry Pi. This will help with testing as we won’t need to wire our entire system together. Now that these are setup, we can focus on setting these up with our sensors so we can do more exhaustive testing.
This site https://vimalb.github.io/IoT-ESP8266-Starter/ was particularly helpful in connecting ESP8266 to wifi and learning Mosquitto (communication protocol for IoT applications). Essentially it works by setting up our Raspberry Pi as a MQTT broker and publish messages to it from our sensor microcontrollers. Messages require a topic and a payload and each have a unique client identifier so we know which controller / sensor our message is coming from.
