Book Image

Raspberry Pi and MQTT Essentials

By : Dhairya Parikh
Book Image

Raspberry Pi and MQTT Essentials

By: Dhairya Parikh

Overview of this book

The future of IoT has the potential to be limitless. Wouldn’t it be great if you could add it to your own technological stacks? But where to start? With the basics, of course. In this book, you will start by learning about the most popular hardware and communication protocol, Raspberry Pi and MQTT. You will see how to use them together by setting up your own MQTT server on Raspberry Pi and understand how it works. This book explores MQTT in detail, including the clients and devices that you can connect to your server. You will discover two very popular IoT development boards among project developers: the ESP8266 and ESP32 development boards. Then, you will learn how to build interactive dashboards on your Pi and monitor your client devices. The book also shows you how to build a dashboard using another popular software – Node-RED. You will be able to put your skills to the test by creating two full-scale projects. That’s not all: you will also learn how to host your own MQTT server on a virtual cloud service. Finally, you will be guided on how to move forward from here, what technologies to learn, and some project recommendations to polish or test your knowledge. By the end of this book, you will be able to build meaningful projects using Raspberry Pi and MQTT and create dashboards for your projects on Node-RED.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1:Covering the Basics
6
Part 2: Practical Implementation – Building Two Full-Scale Projects
9
Part 3: How to Take Things Further – What Next?

Practical demonstration of MQTT in action

In this section, we will look at how the communication protocol works under the hood. For this, we will use an additional software called Wireshark, which lets us capture all the incoming and outgoing MQTT packets from our broker hosted on the Raspberry Pi.

Here, we will look at how a subscriber or a publisher connects to and sends the message through our MQTT broker. So, let’s get started:

  1. The first step is to install Wireshark on our Raspberry Pi. To do so, open your Terminal and type in the following command:
    sudo apt install wireshark 

It will ask you to confirm that you wish to install the package. Just type Y and press Enter. This will start the installation process. When this happens, you will see a configuration screen appear in front of you, as shown in the following screenshot. It will ask if you want to allow any user to have maximum privileges for the Wireshark application. I suggest that you choose No for...