somewhat late to the discussion, I see one platform has been overlooked for convenient streaming of real-time sensor data: https://www.grisp.org/
it’s a bare metal erlang/elixir platform that could send the sensor data through whatever channel one would choose, and @Rich_Morin suggested several options for the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem.
Why would one use this board? PMods - it has readymade drivers for them that won’t need any fragile compilation in C/C++, plus one gets quick turn-around times through hot code reloading. I have one board with a hygro and an 9-axis pmod. Here’s a vid of a hot code reload of a simple “overload” meter: mp4.
lots of “senses” are available
I probably won’t be able to participate in a hackathon but I could try out smaller things on my board in advance, e.g. streaming the sensor data to a piece of Python code on a laptop.
As for receiving streamed data in a fixed loop - I had good experience with the ZeroMQ protocol, as an actual receiving of messages happens on the i/o thread, and at the time of an API “receive” one can fetch all the available messages without waiting (until there’s none) and aggregate/ignore/select the latest one with them.