How-to configure MQTT on Meshtastic

hi and welcome to this new video so I've received request from some viewers to explain how to configure mqtt on mesas stic so what is mqtt well actually if you look at uh what is the mesas STI Network it consists of nodes which have to talk together via radio so obviously it's a mesh Network so the communication goes from one node to another via the Lowa one radio frequency so what happens if you need to communicate between modes which are not connected via the mesh Network well you can do this via mqtt mqtt is in fact a way to communicate between two nodes with the internet in the middle so I will show you how to configure this on the mesas stick app it is included by default in the app it is not an add-on that you have to install as an additional comment of course it may seem deting the purpose of a mesh network to use the internet because the whole purpose of mesh tastic is to be able to Comm unicate of grid without any gsm network without any internet network but still in the meantime of an eventual situation where you really need to communicate of grid mqtt still offers a very nice way to communicate far away until the mesch network is going to be complete enough to allow people to communicate exclusively of great so let's take a look at the screen and the parameters of the application okay so first of all we have to open this app obviously and connect to the node we want to configure with mqtt so we will connect to Rack 2 which is our test module first thing we do is that we go into the three little dots on the right upper corner and we go to Radio configuration under radio configuration you have different sections and on the second section module configuration you will find mqtt press on that and now we are in the mqtt configuration menu so obviously you have to enable the mqtt configuration that's the first parameter to set up and you will notice in the three grade boxes you will have the URL by default which corresponds to the server of mesas stick itself which is a public server so obviously if you connect on that server you will be able to communicate with all the nodes of all the people who are connected to that channel so be careful because you will receive lots lots of message on your device it might even crash your device if there is too much overload of messages so you should only configure your own private Channel and share it with people so as not to be overwhelmed by messages and also not to annoy other people with your own messages so for the demonstration purpose we will keep the default values this consist this in an m server a username and password of that server then uh next you will see the encryption parameter which is optional you might choose not to encrypt your messages but you might as well in the next section you will find gon output enabled what does that mean Jon is a way to structure data in a specific format which is understandable by machine so if at the other end uh of your network connection you will have a machine which will have to interpret the data that you're sending through mqtt then you should activate the gon output be careful because the gon output is only supported on esp32 devices so since I am using for this demonstration a rack wireless device it does not support currently the gon output so I will leave it off TLS what is the TLs option TLS is an encryption protocol parameter which you can activate it is optional I will leave it off for the demonstration purpose root topic is great out because this is imposed by the mqtt server so all of the let's say topics will be rooted under the msh which is the obviously the acronym of mestic if you set up your own mesh tastic server you will uh be free to set up your own root topic and your own username password obviously then proxy to client enabled this is an option to use your phone's internet connection to send and receive packets over the web and we will activate this then once you have configured these basic parameters you just click on send the delivery is confirmed what does that mean it means that your uh device your node has received the parameters from the app via Bluetooth let's close this all right so now we go back into the uh upper menu of the configuration and we will navigate to the channels menu there in the channels menu we will select on which channel we will communicate by default this remains the long fast Channel we will leave it at that for now but once uh you're connected on this be careful because all of the messages that you will publish there will be publicly known by everybody and you will also receive the messages from everybody so you should really use this channel carefully we click on that channel so you will find the default channel name and the default password for this channel which is by default setup as it is and you see two options a link and Don link that you can enable or disable so what does that mean well uh mqtt Works uh as a protocol where you need to subscribe to get messages and you also need to publish uh your messages so that they can be seen by others but you can do this independently so you could just publish messages and never receive messages or on the contrary you could only receive messages and never publish any message here for the the demonstration we will activate obviously both options and then we click on Save and then we click on send to confirm the parameters change to the note I will give a little bit more information about the proxy to client enable option this option is used to use the Wi-Fi or the network connection of your mobile phone on which you're running the App instead of using a direct internet connection between your node and the internet so basically the node will communicate via Bluetooth to the app and the app will communicate to the mqt server via its own internet connection but if you prefer that the node communicates directly to the internet not going through the phone as your proxy you have to go into the network section and you then have to enable the Wi-Fi or to enable uh your ethernet cable if you have a module on your node which enables the internet connection and then you obviously have to configure the SSID of your network and your password with this option enable you will be able to access the mqd server directly from the node um to the Internet so to see if your mqtt configuration works there are multiple ways to check it first you will see uh extra nodes in your list of nodes but be careful this takes a while to be listed so don't panic if you don't see the extra nodes coming in this list very fast it will take a while uh a few minutes or even a few dozens of minutes especially on the public Channel you have many many many notes so it will take a very very long time a second way to check it is to check on your map if you see extra nodes around you basically here I see nodes all over the place in UK in France in Germany which is a proof that I am connected to nodes a very far away via mqtt and obviously not via my radio direct connection and last but not least you can also check that your mqtt is working by simply exchanging messages on the mqtt channel that you have configured in this example uh it is the long fast public Channel but you could uh across the forums you could find many test channels test mqtt channels in your own country or not far away from you uh which may be better because using this public channel will block your Noe there is so much traffic and so much uh load that your node will probably hang so I don't advise you to test with the public long fast channel uh in terms of mqtt of course I advise you rather to either set up your own mqtt channel or to uh use an available public channel on your own uh in your own country so here you go an explanation about how to configure mqtt on the mesas STI app you can comment below of course and you can give your suggestions for future videos thanks for watching and we will see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: Powered Meshtastic Europe

Views: 4,883

Keywords: Meshtastic, MQTT, LoraWan, How-to MQTT

Id: gbZ-ZAoBR3g

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024