HOW TO CREATE A REAL-TIME SHOWROOM IN YOUR OFFICE
Why do we need the SHOWROOM at all?
Now we are working on our new app — MQTT Buddy. It is an MQTT Client for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile users available in English, Russian and Chinese languages.
IoT field still doesn’t belong to mass market and each new product has to prove itself. We decided to create a real time SHOWROOM in our office to show you some of the abilities of our future client.
What will you need ?
First of all we had to create a mock-up model of a room. We used materials at hand: cardboard paper, wires, electric conductors, some glue and adhesive tape, and gifted hands of our designer.
Then we used power supply and fan from PC, CD-ROMs to let the door and blinds open, wires, LED strip light and LED lights, and, of course, ESP8266 with complementing products to control everything.
How everything works ?
When all design works have been done, it was a time to make everything communicate with each other.
MQTT Buddy is based on MQTT, fast lightweight protocol on top of the TCP/IP. It has many advantages for Internet of Things communications:
- Strong Delivery Guarantees
- Flexibility of your subscriptions
- Cloud Broker
- Last will & testament
- Retained Messages
That’s why we chose MQTT for our project. ESP8266 receives commands from our cloud broker via MQTT Protocol: mqtt -> mqtt.xmixim.com. On the server side there are API available for our showroom.
These APIs are integrated on our mqtt.ximxim.com server and let you control the showroom in a real time. To make it available for everyone, we use our local Xeoma video system.
While there are currently a number of competing IoT technologies and protocols in play, the extremely lightweight (2-byte header), publish/subscribe model, and bidirectional capabilities of MQTT are ideally suited to meet the demands of simple home control systems. Besides, MQTT Protocol is perfect for mobile devices where bandwidth and battery power play an important role.
