Tag Archives: MQTT

MQTT Paho C Library

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One of my upcoming “Radio” projects involves MQTT running on a raspberry Pi. I’m more familiar with C than I am with Python so to talk to the MQTT broker I went looking for a C based client.

I eventually settled on the Eclipse Paho MQTT C Client library, however it doesn’t come with an ARM based Linux binary package like you get for all the python peeps. Instead you’ve got to compile this from source, I guess since I’m intending to use C in the first place I should be OK. So back to the command line.

Starting with a bone stock installation of Raspbian Buster Lite I simply used the following commands in a shell;

$ sudo apt-get install git libssl-dev doxygen graphviz
$ cd /tmp
$ git clone https://github.com/eclipse/paho.mqtt.c
$ cd paho.mqtt.c/
$ make
$ make html 
$ sudo make install
$ cd /tmp
$ rm -rf paho.mqtt.c

I found all of the commands above in the git repository README.md file. One thing I noticed was when compiling the libssl-dev library generated a good many “deprecated” warnings about old TLS ciphers being used (ie TLS 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and SSL 2.0 & 3.0) so if you’re intending to use these it might be best to dig a little further. In my case this wasn’t important so I’ve filed it away here as a note to self for future reference.

So now it was just a question if the library works, the simplest way to do this was to compile the included examples and see if they work. So back off to the command line we go.

Eclipse Mosquitto on a rPi

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For a while now I’ve been meaning to investigate the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol or MQTT as it’s more commonly known. While the protocol is nearly 20 years old it has become increasingly popular with the Internet of Things (IoT).

The original MQTT code was donated by IBM and Eurotech to the Eclipse Paho project more than 10 years ago now and since then has been extended and massaged into what is known as Mosquitto today. I also like that Eclipse have done a lot of work writing clients for a great many platforms making the developers job just that much easier. A few of my friends have used it professionally so it comes recommended and seems like a good place to start.

So I wanted to experiment with this on a Raspberry Pi (there is a plan more on this later!), so after a bit of googling I found a nice guide written by Adafruit (click) that was the basis of what I used to setup my MQTT stack.

The following is what I needed to do to install Mosquitto on a stock installation of Raspbian Buster Lite. The Mosquitto package is available pre-compiled for ARM in the Debian repo’s so that makes life much easier;

$ sudo apt-get install mosquitto mosquitto-clients
$ cd /etc/mosquitto/conf.d/
$ pico mosquitto.conf

Once pico has created thew mosquitto.conf file then copy the following configuration into it;

# Config file for mosquitto
#
# See mosquitto.conf(5) for more information.

user mosquitto
max_queued_messages 200
message_size_limit 0
allow_zero_length_clientid true
allow_duplicate_messages false

listener 1883
autosave_interval 900
autosave_on_changes false
persistence true
persistence_file mosquitto.db
allow_anonymous true
password_file /etc/mosquitto/passwd

The configuration above is just a basic one for testing. It is by no means secure or ready for production systems, you have been warned. Once the config has been written the following two commands can be used to start Mosquitto and check it is actually running;

$ sudo systemctl start mosquitto.service
$ sudo systemctl status mosquitto.service

There are small apps that can be used to throw data into the MQTT broker and create topics to publish and subscribe data to and from. Once I’ve worked this out for myself I’ll throw something here.