MQTT is an easy way for Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate with each other. This light-weight protocol can be used with a simple 8-bit Arduino to a Raspberry Pi to a multi-core PC to Amazon Web Services. It is that versatile.
This MQTT Tutorial is broken into two parts. Part one is an MQTT Introduction. You’ll understand how publish/subscribe message brokering works. Next week, Part two will be a tutorial on using MQTT to communicate between a PC, Raspberry Pi, and ESP8266.
Super excited that I’ll be speaking at this month’s Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic (HDDG) #11. The meetup is on Thursday, February 18, 2016. It should come as no surprise that I’ll be talking about capacitors–something I have a bit of experience on.
Also presenting will be SnapEDA CEO’s Natasha Baker. I’ve written about SnapEDA in the past post, How to find Parts for your Electronics.
One reason to come is just to see what the Hackaday / Supplyframe office looks like!
My favorite Raspberry Pi add-on is the PiTFT from Adafruit. With it, you easily get a Raspberry Pi GUI interface and touch screen. The PiTFT software install is just a few things and it is good to go.
This screen is what I needed for my IoT project. The Pi+Screen will act as the primary controller for all of my things. The problem is I didn’t know much about writing GUI applications in Linux. So what could I do to create a Raspberry Pi GUI?
Python is popular in Pi projects, so I decided to stick with it and find out what GUI toolkits are ready to go. “Ready to go” means they install easily on Raspian and work well on the Pi.
Here is how I got Qt5 for Python up and running to create a Raspberry Pi GUI.
Quick timelapse video of Bright Bricks building a life-size BB-8 unit. Surprising to me was that I always imagined these builds solid with LEGO pieces. Turns out, they are built an internal structure, which makes more sense really. Either way, watching this short LEGO BB-8 build is fun.
It continues to amaze me how few Internet of Things (IoT) devices actually communicate with each other. Isn’t Internet connectivity suppose to make it EASIER for things to talk? Computers have been communicating with the Internet for 45 years. Why can’t Light Bulbs from two manufacturers do it?
At some point someone has to come along to “fix” this situation. What is that solution going to look like and how much longer do we have to wait? Let’s get out of the HealthKit era of things talking to each other.
