Level Up Your IoT Projects with Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Node-RED

📌Message Queuing Telemetry Transport is an extremely simple and lightweight messaging protocol designed for limited devices and networks with high latency, low bandwidth or unreliable networks.
MQTT protocol is widely used in IoT, Mobile Internet, Smart Hardware, Internet of Vehicles, Smart Cities, Telemedicine, Power, Oil, Energy, and other fields.

📌So why is MQTT better than HTTP, let's try to figure it out.
With MQTT, messages are pushed in real-time, whereas HTTP requires polling to retrieve data updates. MQTT is stateful, maintaining a connection context, while HTTP is stateless. MQTT can handle abnormal disconnections and recover smoothly, unlike HTTP.
It means that MQTT may work without the Internet. See, it only needs an IP network because it uses TCP/IP for communication between the subscriber or publisher and the broker. An IP network doesn't mean you need internet access. Two devices and one ethernet cable make a network.

📌Devices as Smart sensors, wearables, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices typically have to transmit and receive data over a resource-constrained network with limited bandwidth. These IoT devices use MQTT for data transmission, as it is easy to implement and can communicate IoT data efficiently.

📌Meanwhile Node-RED is a flow-based programming tool for the Internet of Things (IoT). It allows you to connect hardware devices, APIs, and online services to create data flows.

📌Key features of Node-RED: Visual programming (drag-and-drop interface to create flows), pre-built nodes, integration with other systems such as databases, cloud platforms, and messaging systems.

📌Understanding Node-RED at its core, Node-RED is a JavaScript runtime built on Node.js. It uses a browser-based editor to create flows that consist of nodes.

In Node-RED, MQTT nodes facilitate communication using the MQTT protocol. These nodes allow you to interact with MQTT brokers, publish messages to MQTT topics, and subscribe to MQTT topics to receive messages. Node-RED provides several MQTT nodes you can use in your flows.

📌📌Sometimes we encounter projects at work where MQTT-connection is not supported in the stack, it has already become a habit to develop some MQTT-socket server for these problems. Thus, we lower the system requirements for working with this protocol and the entire ecosystem IoT.

📌Node-RED is a versatile tool that can be used for a wide range of applications, from simple IoT projects to complex enterprise systems. Its visual interface and ease of use make it accessible to developers of all skill levels.