Flotilla and MQTT

I've not played with the Flotilla for a few months, but when I was playing with MQTT last month, I kept thinking that I should integrate the flotilla Weather sensor into the MQTT network that we built.

Previously I used and Arduino with a temperature sensor, pushed the data to MQTT, processed the data in Node-Red and finally pushed a message back through MQTT to an LCD screen. You'll need MQTT and Node-Red servers running already, along with the Node-Red flow I built in the last post.

Rewriting it for the Flotilla is mainly a case of changing a few declarations:

make mqtt device

make networkPeer string

make networkConnected boolean

make clientid string

make message string

make topic string

make retain boolean

make flotilla device

make sensor flotillaWeather device

make temperature number

make pressure number

We don't need an ethernet device,  as the MQTT device doesn't need to drive the hardware directly. And I've just replaced the DHT11 with a flotilla dock and weather sensor.

when start

.set clientid to "flotillaSensor"

.set networkPeer to "raspberrypi.local." 

.

.repeat until networkConnected

..tell mqtt to "connect"

.

.say "connected"

.

.broadcast measureStuff

.

.set topic to "text"

.tell mqtt to "subscribe"

.set topic to "office/text"

.tell mqtt to "subscribe"

.forever

..tell mqtt to "loop"

..if not message = ""

...say message

There are a few minor tweaks to change the name of the client, and specific that the MQTT server is on raspberrypi.local before we subscribe to the text topics  Currently there's no text based screen for the flotilla (an i2c 16x2 LCD would be nice...) so when we get the message we just print it on the terminal with "say".

when measureStuff

.forever

..tell sensor to "update"

..

..set retain to yes

..set topic to "office/temperature"

..set message to [temperature]

..tell mqtt to "publish"

..

..set retain to yes

..set topic to "office/pressure"

..set message to [pressure]

..tell mqtt to "publish"

..

..wait 10 secs

The script to do the measuring is essentially the same too, though now we're recording temperature and pressure, rather than temp and humidity.

And that's it! Neat huh? Lots of scope for fun... Have one set of sensors running, and let everyone tap into them, or place sensors all over the place and collect data from them. Have one group of kids responsible for posting data, and other for displaying it - on the same or separate computers.