Building an IoT Prototyping Platform – Part III
This is part of a larger series, you might want to consider reading parts one and two first.
As promised, I will now discuss the parts of the platform in more detail – starting with the server.
The main job of the server is to connect the prototype’s HTML and the ESP devices via MQTT and WebSockets. In the first iteration, I used Node.js and Express to write it, resulting in about 600 lines of code. But since I am a UX designer and not a developer it’s probably best when I don’t write (a lot of) code.
The source code felt a bit crude and overly complex to me. It was hard for someone with little coding experience to get how the server worked. And that made maintaining and changing it hard for regular folks.