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?

Node-RED MQTT components and dashboard setup

This section will start with an introduction to the dashboard and MQTT functionalities of Node-RED. That will be followed by a simple project in which we will connect an LED to a NodeMCU development board and demonstrate control capabilities through the Node-RED dashboard. So, let’s get started.

Node-RED MQTT nodes

The MQTT communication protocol was discussed in detail in the previous chapters. In this section, we will be seeing how can we use MQTT nodes in Node-RED. In Node-RED, you can find two MQTT nodes in the network section:

  • The mqtt in node
  • The mqtt out node

Please refer to Figure 4.13 to see where you would find the MQTT nodes in the node palette:

Figure 4.13 – MQTT nodes under the network section in the node palette

As the names suggest, the mqtt in node is to capture data coming from various topics (basically for monitoring) and the mqtt out node is to publish data...