MQTT on ESP8266

[Philippe Gregoire]

Is there any initiative to integrate MQTT client in the ESP8266 firmware?

[ESP8266 is a ultra low-cost (<$4) Wifi-on-a-chip solution, sporting a 32bit mpu with upgradable firmware and a public C sdk. You talk to it using UART Tx/Rx, and default f/w has a set of AT-style commands to drive the admin and use TCP/IP stack. It has free GPIO for use (most common board exposes 2 on its connector)]

Someone has posted a replacement firmware that exposes LUA scripting instead of AT, I'm wondering if the MQTT LUA client could be used on the chip. This would be an excellent IoT base for autonomous sensors, with or without a companion mpu to drive I/Os.

[Stefano Costa]

On 26/11/2014 10:17, Philippe Gregoire wrote:
> [ESP8266 is a ultra low-cost (<$4) Wifi-on-a-chip solution, sporting a
> 32bit mpu with upgradable firmware and a public C sdk. You talk to it

Interesting Philippe, but can't find reference to the public C sdk, where?

Stefano

[Kyle Gordon]

Their SDK appears to be recently made available on https://github.com/espressif . They also used http://bbs.espressif.com/viewforum.php?f=5 for a while.

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[Kyle Gordon]

Replying to myself…

Further to that, micropython is now ported to the ESP8266, so that may be a good candidate for easy adoption of MQTT support.

The only downside is that they’re still figuring out how to make wifi work on it. Looks promising though!

http://hackaday.com/2014/11/29/micro-python-now-runs-on-the-esp8266-contributors-wanted-to-get-wifi-working/

[Stefano Costa]

Thanks a lot! Looks very interesting.

S

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[Philippe Gregoire]

Thanks Kyle for posting the links, I've been busy trying out the chip and haven't taken time to follow-up.

My early impressions is that LUA is probably the easiest way to go, I could flash the LUA F/W yesterday and that seems quite versatile, more than the official AT command set.
LUA simulates a filesystem on the flash, and allows to store scripts, with a special script that runs upon boot. If you couple this with an external MCU that handles sensors &actuators, it can make a very low-cost/low footprint IoT device.
LUA support is provided by NodeMCU, links to GitHub at http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html. I used their flasher which so far has been the most reliable for me, quite neat UI, which also generates a set of MAC addresses, and their flashcodes (not sure what that would be for, tough...).

Another way would be to port the MQTT client C code, maybe extend the AT command set, i.e. AT+MQTTSUB="topic" AT+MQTTPUB="topic",len,payload, incoming subs would come the same way as incoming IP traffic, they currently have a +IPD output, could have a +MQTTD on the same principle.

For a summary of H/W and some S/W links, you may want to check this wiki out too: http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/88183850/ESP8266

PhG.

[Philippe Gregoire]

Forgot to mention that:
1) ESP8266's maker is Espressif, product page at https://espressif.com/en/products/esp8266/, and their official support channel is a 'BBS' at http://bbs.espressif.com/ (re Kyle's post)
2) There's a quite active community-supported forum at http://www.esp8266.com/, with a specific section about LUA support.

There are already people having built a sensor which sends data to the cloud through HTTP, such as http://www.instructables.com/id/ESP8266-Wifi-Temperature-Logger. Using MQTT for that would allow more flexibility (fire-and-forget for publish, and actuator integration through subscribe, which is more awkward to do with HTTP polling)

PhG

[Marcel Verpaalen]

Hi Philippe,

Seems indeed a native client has been developed. see here : http://www.esp8266.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1031
There are other attempts as well, but not yet functional e.g. https://github.com/soynerdito/ESP8266-MQTT

I'm getting my ESP8266 shortly, , aim to get it running mqtt soon as well.

Op woensdag 26 november 2014 10:17:47 UTC+1 schreef Philippe Gregoire:

[Philippe Gregoire]

Hello all,

So, the latest LUA firmware for the ESP from last week-end has MQTT integrated now (LUA bindings for the aforementioned MQTT port project)
This makes sending sensor readings to platforms such as IOTF very simple indeed.
This latest LUA brew also has support for popular Temp/H%/barometric sensors DS18B20, DHT11, SHT2x in LUA source (script) form.
PhG

[Stefano Costa]

Hi Philippe good news! 

What about auth/encryption? Is TLS supported already? Or user/password only?

Thanks!
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[nemik]

It's not Lua, but this C-based project https://github.com/tuanpmt/esp_mqtt support TLS and user/password. According to http://tech.scargill.net/esp8266-and-mqtt-exciting-times/ it recently became pretty stable for use. I'm waiting for my samples to arrive to start flashing this. Compiling the toolchain and firmware was pretty easy.

[Paul Fremantle]

By the way, I've had a very easy time getting MQTTS working on ESP8266, thanks to the great ESP8266 TLS support from Ivan Grokhotkov.

I used Nicholas O'Leary's PubSubClient and just configured it with a WifiClientSecure instead of WifiClient. That was all I had to do.

Once the mqtt client is connected you can do a wifiClientSecure.verify to validate the fingerprint of the server certificate.

Paul

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[Paul Fremantle]

I should have said, I'm using the Arduino tool with ESP8266 support added in,  v 1.6.9. 

Paul