MQTT, Early Lessons Learned, and a Concern

So, I'm stepping through code trying to work out the best way of switching to mqtt for handling data from various devices and commands to control them and it DIED.

Yep, I couldn't publish anything even though everything was connected. Without anything being published, I naturally couldn't update the weather data base, and everything got lost. Losing data is no big deal, I'll get more; it's not having a clue what went wrong that sucks. I went and looked at the logging for mqtt and enabled it to syslog so I could at least see something, and that's when it started working again. Probably just a coincidence, but I'm leaving the broker logging enabled for a while. During this process I found a nice tool for interacting with mqtt from my Windows laptop mqtt-spy, it is a java application and allows me to stuff things into mqtt and monitor any of the 'topics', but all it told me was that nothing was getting published.

I'll just wait for it to happen again and see if I can get more information.

Otherwise, I decided to organize the topics differently. This is the first of what will probably be a large number of decisions like this ... mostly wrong. Instead of having the weather devices under the topic Desert-Home/Weather, they're now under Desert-Home/Device. I did this because I realized that weather is a collection of readings, not a device. So, the AcuRite 5n1 and the barometer are now Desert-Home/Device/5n1 and Desert-Home/Device/Barometer.

Yes, a comment on my last post by Grant got me to thinking.

As I was moving and changing code, I thought of something else; wouldn't it be cool to create a log of all the activity of the various things in one place on one machine so I could prowl through the day to day operation easily? Thus was invented mqttlogger.py. This new process subscribes to two topics: Desert-Home/Log and Desert-Home/Attention and simply writes what it receives to stdout. I redirect stdout to a file in the init configuration file and ta da, a log of whatever activity I want in one place. The topic Desert-Home/Attention is for stuff like the batteries going dead in the weather head or one of my battery operated devices. I'll eventually hook email to the Attention topic so I can be notified more easily.

The possible plan is to create a topic called Weather that has levels for the various readings that matter. There would be Desert-Home/Weather/CurrentTemp, HighestDaily, CurrentBarometer, RainfallToday, etc. Then I could pick and choose from the various values to present when I get that far. Frankly though, that's a lot of work and it may get modified to a JSON string that represents the weather reading right now. We'll see when I get there.

The weather station software has been converted to use mqtt now and is working reasonably well with the caveat that it may stop at any time because of the problem I mentioned up top. I can monitor the various things using mqtt-spy to see each device and the items involved including the log I created.

I'll post the code for the logger soon, I want to get a little time on it before I go and embarrass myself, and I want to give it a couple of days before cramming it into GitHub.

If it wasn't for that nagging possibility of it failing again I'd be really pleased.