Redis messaging:

To reduce the number of times the NodeJS listeners would have to manipulate the messages they were receiving, and to establish a new standard of data sent around the system I moved the text manipulation code from the MongoDB listener to Redis Queue. This manipulation includes invoking the createFinalJSON command that converts messages from the Youtube Listener (Python) to Javascript values, fixes the dates, and lowercases the color hex values. This also mitigates an issue I had in OpenFrameworks; when messages from Youtube came in, the program crashed.   

Arduino v2:

  Initially, the code for the Arduino would listen to serial commands inside the loop function. Also, I was checking for colons and running nested loops to get the serial data. This was incredibly slow; it also relied on blocking functions. This caused the Arduino to have a lag time from input to LED coloration of ~700ms. It would also disregard new messages while it was computing the last message.    To fix this, I implemented Serial Event from here: https://create.arduino.cc/example/builtin/04.Communication%5CSerialEvent/SerialEvent/preview   Using a similar technique to the link, I created a string from the characters received over serial sent in the if serial available while loop. If a newline character was sent (‘\n’), break from the loop. Once broken from, I used substring to split the numbers based on RGB, 3 index values each (Red values 0-3, Green 4-7, Blue 8-11). Because of this, though, I had to make sure each RGB value was actually 3 digits. (Example: red is 255:0:0) So, to fix this in my Arduino Listener function I converted the RGB values to strings, and if they were single digit numbers added two 0s to the front, and if they were 2 digits added one 0 to the front. Also, my Arduino code now after the first message it received produces a bug that cuts off the first character of subsequent messages. This means that a message of “250:100:100” will result in a red/green/blue value of 250/100/100 if sent as the first message. But, if that message was sent as the second or subsequent message the red/green/blue value would be “50:”/”00:”/”00”. To fix this, I added a 0 in the NodeJS script to fix it. The lag time for this new way of doing things is sub 50ms.