MQTT is superb, "designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium"
This is similar to the tactical packet communications I helped bring into the UK a few years ago. I haven't used APRS for well over 10 years, and it was just hardware and software, set it up and off you go. I had my weather station, house and car all on the 2m ham band.
MQTT on the other hand needs coding skill to get anything out of it. So how does a non-coder get anything done with this fantastic capability?
One of the simplest things you can do is grab a Current Cost energy monitor and use that as a data source for "doing something with". There's a lot of information out there to cover this very project, with scripts in python, perl and java available to take data that the monitor is publishing and make energy usage graphs or pump it to an mqtt message broker such as mosquitto.
But... everything out there is written by people that know what they're doing. The Perl and Python works for those that wrote it, if it doesn't work when you try it, well your adventure can end pretty quickly. Of course there are irc channels and email lists to talk about your problems but it can be a long and frustrating struggle.
I have my Current Cost publishing data (again) using mosquitto and from there I should be able to take the data and do, well anything I can imagine. Of course there's some web based graphs to be made, but I'd also like to have some way of pushing selected data to my phone. Then there's the rest of the house to measure and publish, oh and I have my weather station to get up and running again before I see if that can be used with mqtt.
All of this I plan to document, for myself as much as anyone, from the codeless and clueless perspective so that those that can't, might one day be able to too.
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