Our new plugin for Ezlo controllers, the MQTT plugin is now available on the marketplace. You can copy it to your controller and start using it immediately.
The MQTT plugin allows you to utilize the MQTT messaging protocol and its publish/subscribe architecture in order to control your devices with the MQTT capability. MQTT is a lightweight, publish-subscribe, machine to machine network protocol. It is designed for connections with remote locations that have devices with resource constraints or limited network bandwidth.
In order to install and configure the plugin, start with copying it from the marketplace. Navigate to the Edge Plugins menu, then to the Marketplace tab. Click the Copy to my Ezlo button for the MQTT plugin. Once the plugin is successfully copied to your account and you’re taken back to the My Private Plugins tab, click the Manage Installations button for the MQTT plugin and install the plugin to your controller.
Once you do that and you see the success message, click the Configure button.
Configure the plugin by providing the details:
IP Address: IP address of your MQTT server
Username: The client’s username
Password: The client’s password
Keep Alive: Maximum amount of time allowed with no interaction from the MQTT server
Once you’re done, click the Save New Configuration button.
You will now be able to view the MQTT client you’ve configured in your devices list, use the MQTT client in your MeshBot triggers based on MQTT message and topic, and send a packet to your MQTT client in MeshBot actions.
Trying to understand the concept and why I might want to use this? So could an MQTT message sent via a broker / server be sent to the Ezlo hub / this MQTT client plugin, to then control say a Z-Wave device ?
Read a bit about the use of MQTT in home automation. There’s a lot of work being done in that area, check for example the zigbee2mqtt project (not really necessary with a zigbee native bridge like Ezlo), easy integration with Node Red, and there are actual devices which support MQTT natively.
You can also use MQTT to interface with other cloud IoT platforms. Tuya IoT, Azure IoT Hub, IBM Watson IoT, they all support MQTT messaging.
I am trying to configure the MQTT plugin and would like to know the following:
Is there documentation for this plugin?
Which port does the plugin support? Does it support both the non-ssl 1883 port and the ssl 8883 port? If so, how do I configure the port? If you can’t currently, it should be added.
Are the username and password required? In other words, if I leave them blank, will the client connect to a local broker over port 1883 without credentials?
Is the source code available? If so, I can probably answer most of my questions simply by looking at the source code.
IMHO, the best way to encourage non-Ezlo developers to develop plugins is to publish the source code to the Ezlo plugins as exemplars. You guys should consider posting all the plugins to GitHub.
