This was a project to create a simple way to hook up a low-cost sensor to a graph or model running in the browser. There are plenty of more sophisticated IoT solutions these days, but when I did this those weren’t as common, and Web Bluetooth didn’t exist (and is still only partially supported).
This took advantage of the fact that Arduino shields existed that could run a tiny server on them that could update itself with data from sensors. And computer with both wifi and an ethernet connection can actually connect to a server through the ethernet while still remaining connected to the web through the WiFi.
With this technique, we could create webpages with all sorts of embedded components, such as graphs that can listen for the data, or even models and simulations that could update themselves, like an atomic model whose atoms vibrate faster when the temperature is higher.
I wrote about the project in an @Concord article, Under the Hood: Streaming Arduino Data to a Browser., and the graphs and models should still work there if you were to hook up an Arduino.