Support for nonwireless (i.e., hardwired) control of demo

[sgbaird]

Requested and suggested by Jason Hattrick-Simpers (@jae3goals).

Some related content from the Star Protocols paper:

Problem 2:

Can I use this without connecting to the internet?

Potential solution:

A simple example of wired communication between a computer and the microcontroller for the microcontroller host code and a Jupyter notebook tutorial (client) can be found at https://github.com/sparks-baird/self-driving-lab-demo/tree/main/src/extra/nonwireless [permalink] and https://github.com/sparks-baird/self-driving-lab-demo/blob/main/notebooks/5.0-nonwireless-search.ipynb [permalink], respectively. While possible with some modification, data communication via a USB cable is not actively supported for new releases of microcontroller host code nor the advanced tutorials. For private, secure, wireless communication between the Pico W microcontroller and the client (e.g., Jupyter notebook running locally), a free, private HiveMQ instance can be set up per the instructions in Software Setup. For recommendations regarding connecting to a 2.4 GHz network (e.g., in university classroom settings) see #83 and #88. See also page 3.

It seems like a good feature to enable manual control. At first, it seemed like modifying main.py and the self-driving-lab-demo package would be difficult and convolute the code, but I'll give this some more thought. Alternatively, a separate main.py file specific to the wired communication could be used but would need to be kept and maintained. Maybe on the self-driving-lab-demo package side, I could simply specify a custom observe_sensor_data_fn.