What is MQTT and Why You May Want to Use It
Ohio Pen/10221402

CLEVELAND - OhioPen -- Over the last 2 years, we have seen several of our equipment manufacturers start providing support for the MQTT protocol for sending measurements from remote devices. In this post, I'll give you a little background on MQTT, why you might want to use it, and how it works with a small example.

What is MQTT?

MQTT was designed as a method or protocol for sending messages (data) between pieces of equipment or machines. The name comes from Message Queue Telemetry Transport but since 2013 it has just been MQTT. It was designed for use in sending data from equipment in remote locations where there were limited resources, think battery-powered equipment with limited communications bandwidth and limited computing resources.

Basic MQTT Architecture

Central to MQTT is the concept of a message broker. The broker is a server that is running software that acts as an intermediary to receive messages from clients and then route or publish these messages out to other clients. A client can be a publisher which is a producer of data or a subscriber which is a consumer of data.

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Why Use MQTT?

We've recently started using MQTT in a few simple applications where it made sense. It is useful in projects where you are looking to see data from a remote location that is updated every few minutes.

Two simple MQTT Applications

A typical MQTT application could be as simple as sending real-time data from a humidity transmitter in a lab or storage area within a facility to a PC in the same office to monitor and archive the data.  We built a sample project using a Novus LogBox Wi-Fi data logger and an older PC running the open-source Mosquitto broker software.

The LogBox is very easy to configure to send data via MQTT using the NXperience configuration utility. The screen capture below shows the communications settings to talk to the broker software running on the PC with IP address 192.168.10.11.

The second application is a remote soil monitoring project where the data is sent to a cloud-based software package to display and save the data. The data logger that was used is the Infinite ADS-300, a compact battery-powered data collector that includes a cellular NBIoT/CAT-M model to upload data. The ADS-300 was connected to a soil moisture sensor using an SDI-12 interface.

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Summary

MQTT is an established data exchange protocol with support showing up on more devices. As an alternative to the common "store data in memory and download" used by data loggers, it allows for more real-time information.

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