OOCSI Basics

Ok, here is where you start your journey with OOCSI. The videos on this and the following pages for intermediate and advanced topics were shot as part Mathias’ course “Technologies for Connectivity” at Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology.

OOCSI Basics 1

In the very first video lecture we talk about the motivation and general ideas behind the OOCSI middleware. OOCSI is technology that supports you in prototyping connected devices and systems of connected products. That’s why you will hear us talk about “systems” a lot. This video shows how to get started with Processing and what you need to do to install the OOCSI library in Processing. We run the first sketch and connect to the system. We subscribe to a channel and receive the first data. Finally, we explain what messages are and how to get data items out of an incoming OOCSI message.

After watching this video you should have Processing set up on your computer with the latest version of the OOCSI library installed. You have received the first messages from the OOCSI system! 👀 That’s where the second video starts off…

OOCSI Basics 2

This is the second part of the OOCSI Basics in which we dive deeper into messages on the OOCSI system. We do a short recap of messages and then explain message contents and how to structure them with key-value pairs. Next comes a short piece on how to send messages (that’s why you here, right?). It’s actually really simple: channel -> data -> more data -> send. We then explain point-to-point and broadcasting communications, and we go into a short fun hands-on exercise: paint the canvas.

After the hands-on, we explain data types (what kind of data you can send with OOCSI and how). Messages carry not only data, but also sender, receiver and a timestamp – and they never “echo” back to your client.

After this video, you should be able to send data as structured messages in the OOCSI system. You know how to add data to a new message and also how to get it out of a message that you have received from the system. Finally, you heard about some conventions in the system: everything is case-sensitive and it’s good to double-check spellings of channel names and data keys.

Are you ready for more? Head over to the OOCSI tools or the intermediate topics!