For many years, the Eclipse Foundation has offered an MQTT sandbox to the IoT developer community. That sandbox was maintained by Foundation staff and was running on Foundation infrastructure. The goal was to encourage and facilitate the evaluation of Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto, and to foster interoperability among MQTT implementations. Today, I have the pleasure to announce the deployment of a new community-run MQTT sandbox to replace it.
A couple of days ago, Google announced that they were essentially rebranding Brillo to Android Things (I do love that name, by the way!), and finally opening it for a Developer Preview.
I was just asked how one can deploy a similar setup as the iot.eclipse.org MQTT sandbox, where MQTT over WebSockets is available on port 80, just like the rest of the website.
I’ve recently been playing around with Snappy Ubuntu Core, and I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and package Mosquitto as a so-called “Snap”.
This blog post will give you a quick introduction to Snappy, and what it means to have a technology like Mosquitto available as a snap package.
What I really like with MQTT and CoAP is that they both are very simple protocols. When dealing with MQTT, the client itself has almost no state to maintain (at least when you stick to QoS 0 communications) and granted that you have an MQTT packet serializer/unserializer, it’s very simple to stuff such MQTT packets into TCP sockets using the networking APIs that your IoT microcontroller is providing.
In just about a week is EclipseCon France, and here’s one more reason why it’s going to be awesome! This year you will all be actors of a real-world Internet of Things setup, that leverages several Eclipse IoT technologies.
The Rapiro is a nice open-hardware robot, controlled by an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi.
Earlier this week, I decided that he’d be nice if I could run Eclipse Orion directly on the robot, allowing me to write an app that would bridge the Rapiro to the Internet (there’s a WiFi dongle attached to the RaspberryPi so the robot does have Internet access), using MQTT.
