Cassandra wrote up a summary of some progress the tech team made over the past few weeks:
We’ve made significant progress in connecting our network through the server and over the web. It was relatively simple to make the server pull data from the database and concatenate the data text into a URL that the camera would understand. There are many handy modules for Python to speak to MySQL database; in this case, we used PyMySQL. However, figuring out how to send that URL to the camera automatically was more challenging. Cassandra and Tom found the HTTP Protocol Client in the python library, which greatly simplified the process. One can send the values of pan, tilt, zoom, and focus by POSTing to the IP address and port of the camera. The function returns a number code to alert you as to the success of the action.
The server is also communicating with the iPad now, receiving strings of text. Anthony and Cassandra found C# scripting for socket client connections and, with a little tweaking, successfully sent strings – such as a 6 digit barcode – over the wireless router to the server. In the process, we’ve learned a lot about how servers and clients operate and how to derive a desired function from sockets. Looking forward, we’re establishing text codes to send for events on the iPad, such as click events or onscreen events. As we get these developed, we’ll be building the environmental elements for the world.