If you haven’t heard of Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Camp, imagine a field in the quaint English countryside, temporarily populated by 2,500 curious tech/maker enthusiasts; fiber internet, radio masts, robotic bartenders, lasers illuminating the sky, and wild/wacky inventions as far as the eye can see.

One of these wacky inventions was the EMF Roamer, a quarter-scale wooden Tesla Cybertruck, deployed to roam around the side, controlled by anyone over the internet!

Just allowing people to drive it line of sight wasn’t good enough! Especially not in the world of the Internet of Things. Live video from a camera, along with the location on a map is streamed to the user while they have control of the roamer.

A free for all in terms of control would have been a mess, so we devised a queue system. People could join the queue in their web browser and wait their turn, or provide a mobile phone number to receive an SMS when their turn is up (thanks Vonage!). The queue system is “serverless”, in that it does not require a dedicated server. Instead, it runs on simple shared hosting, with PHP coordinating the queue on-demand, which is stored in a MySQL database.

To build a queue system for yourself, take a look at the WebUserQueue project on my GitHub, or follow the guide on the Vonage Developer Blog.