How to Use MQTT: Tips from Experts
Published in
2 min readMay 22, 2017
Last week we released MQTT Buddy, a new MQTT client on Android. It’s a simple and lightweight (only 1.7 Mb) mobile app which is very easy to use.
Our client is based on MQTT Protocol that uses publish/subscribe pattern. That means that you subscribe to different topics where other clients publish their messages. All the messages are going through MQTT Broker. General scheme of MQTT communication:
Here are some tips how to name topics properly.
- Topics are case-sensitive. Be careful with that because kitchen/temperature and Kitchen/Temperature are two different topics
- Do not start your topic with a forward slash: /home/kitchen/temperature. In this case you create an extra topic level with a zero character at the front.
- Avoid using spaces in a topic because it makes harder to read and debug topics if something goes wrong.
- Try to create short topics. For small devices it’s important to save the size of sending information. Topics are always included in every message it’s used in.
- Avoid uncommon characters. Try to use only ASCII characters because they are displayed correctly.
- Remember about extendibility. It should be easy to add new sensors or IoT devices to your topic hierarchy without changing the whole topic tree.
- Be specific. Use detailed topics name. For instance, when you have two sensors in a kitchen, create two different topics: home/kitchen/temperature and home/kitchen/motion instead of sending all messages to home/kitchen
If you have some tips from your own experience share it :)