MQTT settings for Meshtastic node including the hard to find ones.

hello in this video I'm going to be talking about mqtt on the mesh tastic Network and how to enable it and what it can do and things to watch out for and perhaps what you shouldn't do um so first of all what does mqtt stand for well it's this message queuing Telemetry transport Which is popular According to some articles that Google found and it's a way of connecting a device like this this is htech V3 mesh tastic node this one has got an idea of BTN 6 and at the moment it's communicating with my mobile phone and this is the mqtt configuration page but what does mqtt do well it connects the node to the internet and at the moment if we look at my Pier list for neighboring nodes you just see this device itself BT bn6 that's this one here and this one is btn2 which is um another node I'm using for testing in the same room to see what happens when I turn on mqtt so what happens is the mqtt protocol can relay data from other nodes in the internet to this node and that's quite useful if you're in a place where there are no signals that you can receive using the Laura interface of course I'm not receiving much because I got a dummy load connected here to prevent radiating signals because I don't want to pollute the local network with mqtt information because there can be a lot of it as you'll see in a moment hopefully so I didn't want to do that so this is an isolated Network just in this room this node here also has a dummy load on it in case it relays the mqtt information and as you can see there are only two nodes and there will only ever be these two nodes um until either I put an antenna on or if I'm in a situation where I'm somewhere remote and I want to communicate then I can switch on mqtt and then the node sends and receives data via an internet connection which could be the internet connection of this mobile phone or and what I'm going to show you first of all is along the USB cable there's a laptop and this laptop I'm going to use to configure the device you'll see why in a moment because there's some not hidden settings but settings that don't seem to be accessible at the moment using the Bluetooth interface from the phone I'm running version 2.21 of the software the stable beta and in order to configure the device then you go you click on it BTN 6 radio configuration and then if you look down here module configuration there's mqtt it's not easy doing this and filming at the same time that's the mqtt setting so I've enabled it excuse me the default setting is disabled or turned off so I've enabled it it's got the address of the mqtt server it's going to connect to which is belonging to mesh task. org it's got a login username and password which is default password that all of the devices will have encryption is enabled so it's it's it's encrypted just in case and then um what you also have to turn on is this proxy to client enabled well that's talking about is an internet propy connection to the client and the client in this case is this mobile phone so it's that's the connection from the internet from the client to this device so that has to be turned on as well and there are a couple of other settings um that you need to turn on and you'll see those in a moment um at the moment you'll see that if I look in the list of users or other peers there aren't any appearing yet and that's because there's another setting that needs to be changed so let's go into settings again and this is the one which now allows you to enable mqtt traffic if you don't want to see it on your node if someone's got it switched on on theirs and what you have to do is um not use the module configuration mqtt settings those are correct but you have to go into the laurum uh settings which is the actual radio configuration and in the laurum settings which are here and it it's switched on Laura good it's always worth checking transmits enabled 27 dbm it always defaults that I think that the uh the htech device can only put out 22 dbm which is 100 and something Mills not 500 anyway and what you need to do is to look at this setting where is it gone aha down here it's right at the bottom it's the last setting on this configuration page at the moment until maybe the software gets updated so you may have a different version um boosted gain is important that's the received gain can be boosted on the sx1262 chip which gives it really good performance and that's the frequency that's correct ignore mqtt is turned on and that's why it's not receiving any mqtt data so what I have to do is turn that off like that and I have to remember to press the send button to send this setting to the device and if I do that the device should reboot oh you have to press that's interesting this is the oh there we go it was rebooting it just didn't say rebooting so now the device is rebooted to apply that new setting there we go so let's go back to the mobile phone terminal device and take a look and see if there are any new nodes appearing it might take a few seconds or minutes but I think that there's a couple of missing settings here I can't remember what state I left it in and the missing settings you can only see on a web over serial interface that's plugged into the uh USB port so we have to go to the laptop what I have to do is I have to configure so the way to do that is to go to this URL here which is not an internet URL really it's a local host URL in my network so you click on client. mesh. org open the link opens it in a new tab and you can see there are no devices connected at the moment this is a web browser running I think it's JavaScript which um enables you to do web over serial so you have to press let's get a bit closer press new connection and then serial I don't want to use HTTP and I don't want to use Bluetooth I want to use serial connection over the USB port and there it is if that hasn't been added yet you need to add it just by a few clicks you know it's fairly self-evident how to do that but this has been added before so I click on that Dink and then it takes me to the control panel for that htech meshnet node and let's have a look at the peer list oh wow there we are look at that it started filling up actually I think that's my previous experiment because if I look on the phone those may not be there oh they are there okay so then during the time I was talking for a minute or two all of these peir have appeared via the mqtt connection in the internet they not received on the radio not received on that dummy load and the kind of hidden setting or the setting that took me a little bit longer to find to make all of this work is you have to go into channels here and this is the primary Channel what do you have to do is you have to go down to here and you have to enable these two settings here and this is talking about mqtt Uplink and down link you have to enable and if you don't do that then it won't work and the problem of course is that these two settings I can't find on the mobile phone app I don't think they're there so if you want to send messages from the local MH to the mqtt server and the other way around you have to turn these on you can decide what you want I've got both on and that's what makes it work if in the default factory settings these are off so even after you've enabled mqtt and the proxy and everything else um you won't see any mqtt peers appearing or traffic appearing so more and more of these are coming in I can see them on this screen here or I can see them on the phone over here sometimes when you have a USB serial web interface connected to the client then some of the phone functions don't work properly or not at all so quite often I find I have to close this tab on the browser for the controller so that the phone can be used to change settings or to do something so let's have a look in messages and oh oh yes look at this here's a whole long list of messages that have been sent and received via mqtt that I can see and normally I would look in a channel called primary which is the long fast um I think it I don't know if it's UK only or or wider um but it's the one where everybody can see can send and receive text messages so be careful what you say it's not a private oneto one chat you'd have to click on um appears individually here for a private oneto one chat which in this case is allegedly encrypted because I didn't turn on the amateur radio setting in the settings and if you turn that on then the encryption is Switched Off because AM radio amate is not allowed to send encrypted information has to be clear so uh that's the primary long fast Channel there's nothing popping up in there at the moment but there could be but as I said sometimes it's better to just use the um the app on the phone because it seems to work better especially um when there's a USB plug into a laptop that's running that uh web interface and you can see here this is the long fast Channel varus messages not too many but they will start to pop up so that's my explanation of mqtt how to enable it how to make it work what I can't show you unfortunately is how that's rebroadcasting my network work because I'm actually filming on the phone that I used to control the other node so I can't do both things at once so you won't actually be able to see what happens but I can tell you that if you connect an antenna to this node then the mqtt received data will be broadcast on the mesh which fills it up very quickly so it's not a recommended thing to do and all the other nodes then will also acquire these lists of peers and so on um if you want a node that you have not to acquire this long list because somebody is sending the mqtt data then all you need to do is go into the settings the config uh Laura settings and switch off or to block the mqtt data maybe I can find it on here as well so if I go config radio config and then where's Laura there's Laura click on that and you can see I think it was right at the bottom wasn't it uh no it's in different places depending on whether you're using the app on a phone or this this interface here ignore mqtt is turned off and so the node will receive the mqtt data so if you don't want to see it and someone's transmitting it just turned on turn on the ignore mqtt and remember to press the save button up there if you don't press that the setting is not saved when you by the way are in the channels settings at the bottom to turn on these two settings if you want to you have to press the submit button and I think I've discovered that it doesn't work until you actually press the button in the top right hand corner on the the config because then it's really sent to the radio and the radio is told to reboot if it doesn't reboot because nothing's changed you can just change something quickly and back again and then it will reboot so that's my uh quick presentation about MPT as I understand it hope it's correct please don't complain if it's long wrong but I look forward to getting any comments you may have about uh what your experience using mqt and meshnet in general and I'm happy to make more videos as I discover things I'll publish them I try to publish not the standard how to set stuff up because that's been done very well by plenty of other people but it's when I discover weird things that took a while for me to work out then I'll publish those in said all antenna testing um I do have a Facebook group as well which I'll link in the description called meshnet Brighton because that's where I live so I'll I'll publish a link so you can have a look at that there's a bit of information being exchanged on there too so thanks for listening and uh hopefully I'll see you in the next video remember to like And subscribe and all the usual byebye

Channel: Simon Phillips

Views: 10,732

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Id: 46D3-0J_YTA

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024