MQTT 3.1.1 for Industrial Automation: Build Real Systems

Learn to design and architect mqtt systems for industrial automation by understanding why mqtt exists, where it belongs, and where it does not, through publish-subscribe fundamentals and real-world architectures.

Contrast poll-response with MQTT pub-sub, explaining brokers and topics, data-change reporting, and the efficiency and IT-OT considerations in industrial automation.

Businesses chasing higher revenue and efficiency drive mqtt adoption, enabling secure data push from plant networks to the IT network while protecting air-gapped systems.

Explore three real-world uses of mqtt in industrial automation, from sharing plant data to head office analytics, to cloud predictive maintenance and remote equipment monitoring.

Demystifies the edge gateway as a protocol converter that translates OPC UA to MQTT and supports Modbus and Profibus, enabling edge data flow to an MQTT broker.

Build a real industrial MQTT system by simulating a plant with ModScan, connecting Node-RED to Mosquito, and visualizing data in Grafana. Use MQTT Explorer to monitor the broker.

Download and install the mosquito mqtt broker, set it as a background service, and update the system path for CLI access. Verify the setup with mosquito -h.

Use mosquito_sub to subscribe to test topic and mosquito_pub to publish 'hello world' on a local broker, confirming the broker works and introducing publish–subscribe basics.

Install mqtt explorer, connect to a Mosquito broker, publish and view topics and values, explore the built-in $SYS topics, and confirm messages overwrite history, preparing for building an mqtt system.

Install Node.js and then install Node-RED to run a browser-based visual programming environment for MQTT projects. Start Node-RED and access it at localhost:1880 to test communication with your Mosquito broker.

Explore how Node-RED bridges OT and IT with an edge gateway, using flows of nodes to publish to a test topic via MQTT and verify with MQTT Explorer.

Download and install Grafana, a browser-based application used in the it and ot areas, that runs as a Windows service to display mqtt broker data via localhost:3000.

Configure Grafana with the mqtt data source by installing the mqtt plugin, connect to the mosquito broker at localhost:1883, and display test topic data in a dashboard panel.

Connect Node-RED to the Mosquito broker, link Grafana to Mosquito, and monitor with MQTT Explorer while publishing test values to the test topic to validate phase 1.

download and extract mod sim 32 from the resource, run the 32-bit executable in trial mode, and if issues occur, use mod sim 64 from win-tech.com in demo mode.

This lecture demonstrates integrating ModSim with Modbus through Node-RED, reading the first 16-bit input register from a Modbus tcp server and sending it to Grafana via mqtt test topic.

Learn how MQTT report by exception functions and why MQTT does not enforce it, then apply data-change publishing to conserve bandwidth, noting keep-alive exceptions.

Demonstrate setting up report by exception in an MQTT system using Node-RED as edge gateway, Modbus data, and Grafana visualization to publish only when values change.

Explore how retained messages in mqtt work, using the retained flag to store the last published value per topic so new subscribers receive the latest data, such as boiler temperature.

Demonstrate how retained messages work in an MQTT system by enabling the retain flag, publishing updates, and showing that a new subscriber receives the last retained value (300).

Explore MQTT quality of service levels from QoS 0 to QoS 2, including at least once and exactly once, with duplicates, and apply them to sensor streams and industrial IoT.

Understand how MQTT client ID and the clean session flag choose between auto-generated and explicit IDs, and how they affect persistent sessions and broker acceptance.

Explain persistent sessions vs clean sessions in MQTT: when disconnected, persistent sessions queue messages for later delivery, while clean sessions may cause missed updates and require explicit client id.

Demonstrate persistent sessions and queued messages by configuring MQTT with QoS 1, switching clean session off, and reconnecting to receive queued data in order from the broker.

Add timestamps to queued MQTT messages to preserve data history during disconnections, enabling data logging, archival, and trend analysis by publishing structured payloads with value and timestamp in Node-RED.

Explore hierarchical address space and wildcards in MQTT topics, contrasting flat SCADA tags with broker topics, explain case-sensitive names and broker-internal dollar-sign prefixes, and learn single- and multi-level wildcard usage.

Explore building a hierarchical topic structure by importing a Node-RED flow, configuring MQTT topics for a compressor, and visualizing the address space in Grafana.

Demonstrate mqtt topic wildcards with mosquitto_sub, using verbose output to show topic names. Subscribe to suction, pressure, temperature, and all data under compressor 1 with single-level and multi-level wildcards.

Explore birth, close, and last will and testament (LWT) messages, plus keepalive, and show how MQTT brokers track client status to ensure timely data in industrial automation.

Demonstrate birth, close, and LWT messages to signal gateway status in an industrial MQTT setup, publishing online and offline states with retain enabled and QoS1.

Explore how keepalive in mqtt sends periodic heartbeats over tcp/ip to detect half-open connections; if missed, the broker closes the connection and triggers the lwt by default every 60 seconds.