MQTT is an OASIS standard messaging protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is ideal for connecting remote devices with a small code footprint and minimal network bandwidth.
https://mqtt.org/
I continue to use OpenHabian. Currently it does just a few (very useful) things:
- Turns on the heating in the TV room if the TV is turned on and it is cold outside and it is cold in the room
- Turns on the heating in my wife’s sewing room if her radio is on and her phone is on the wifi
- Thanks us for topping up the boiler (verbally) when the coffee machine turns off.
With the increase in electricity costs I thought it would be interesting to play with power monitoring smart sockets. I wanted to use tasmota but was too lazy to go through the rigmarole of flashing something myself. I bought four from athom. I imagined they would take weeks from Hong Kong or something but they came within a week. I should have read their shipping page which says 4-6 days.
Getting them to work with OpenHabian was fine. I just used some excellent instructions from the OpenHAB forum. MQTT explorer is excellent. The only minor change was that it does not tell you you can rename them in the MQTT configuration by changing the topic. I had to keep the faith with OpenHabian, and it worked first time.
Now I have to work out what to do with them. I bunged them on 171-174 ip address and plugged them in to the following:
- Printer
- Microwave
- TV stack
- PC
This reminded me that I really feel I need to understand openhabian better :-/