MQTT has been around for a long time.

Many people are finding out about it for the first time. While it can be an extremely powerful tool across many use cases and industries, it is also a dense topic to learn.

There are a lot of tutorials out there showing you how to accomplish a specific task in a particular scenario. If you aren’t trying to do that exact thing you are going to run into some hurdles.

The Goal of MQTT Mafia

MQTT Mafia’s primary goal is to simplify MQTT, make it easy to understand across the many different use cases, and give you the tools you need to be proficient with MQTT.

While there are probably interesting ways you could use MQTT in a criminal sense, we are using the definition of Mafia to mean the following:

“a group of people of similar interests or backgrounds prominent in a particular field or enterprise”

Our similar interests are MQTT, data management, and educating the world on how to use technology to solve problems. We have experience in manufacturing, technology, software development, home automation, and many other areas, using MQTT as a way to connect different devices, people, systems, and send data back and forth.

You might find us on the floor of the Entelec conference. You might find us discussing the ins and outs of MQTT in conjunction with Unified Namespaces, and you might find us setting up sensors at our houses to collect as much interesting data we can about the worl around us.

We are not a closed group, we welcome new people into the fold all the time and are excited to have us be part of your journey!

We plan to accomplish this goal by doing a few things:

  1. Explaining HOW to do things, first in specific instances, then generalizing the concepts so you can apply them anywhere.
  2. Using open source tools and/or free tools where possible.
  3. Showing you real-world architectures and implementations
  4. Doing cool stuff you wouldn’t think is possible with MQTT

How to Do and How to Generalize

The main hurdle in most MQTT tutorials and documentation is giving you a single example of setting up a connection and not giving you any context as to why you are making certain decisions.

This leads to a lot more troubleshooting and banging your head against the wall than anyone should have to experience while trying to get data from point A to point B.

If you have ever not seen data come across because your Primary Host ID didn’t match, you didn’t use the correct format for your access lists, or you had an errant typo in a topic name you are not alone.

MQTT doesn’t have to be a house of cards where the only way to figure it out is to keep shuffling up and trying again when it falls over. You don’t need Arlen Nipper, one of the creators of MQTT to come out to your facility to implement it for you, and you certainly don’t need to spend as much time as we have over the years scratching your head until you finally stumble upon the magic combination that works.

We will not only show you how to do a particular task, demonstrating WHAT we are doing. We will also explain WHY we are doing it, and how that applies to the overall concepts in play. This will help you expand your knowledge and understanding, making it easier to solve problems in the future.

Free and Open Source Where Possible

Yes you can spend a decent amount of money on MQTT software, cloud brokers, and labor to set everything up. One of the beauties of MQTT is being able to take advantage of free and open source tools to learn without having to invest anything more than your time.

Unless we are diving into a particular tool to demonstrate something, we will use free and open source options wherever possible to make it easy for anyone with a computer to get their hands dirty with MQTT.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

While we won’t be opening up brokers to the public to get into closed systems, we will be explaining how we have used MQTT across various industries, applications, and use cases to give you an idea of what is possible.

It’s great to hear conference sessions looking at millions of data points streaming all over the world. Numbers on a slide deck don’t always translate to the nitty gritty details of how something works.

We will share examples of how it has worked for us in the past, lessons we learned along the way, and how you can get the same results, or even leapfrog us and do your own awesome stuff!

Let’s Do Cool Stuff You Didn’t Think Was Possible!

MQTT is an interesting protocol. Not only can you do typical, some might even say boring, stuff with it like sending process data from one place to another. Sure, you can set up edge nodes and converge your IT/OT networks, and build Unified Namespaces.

You can also set up messaging interfaces (Facebook uses MQTT for its Messenger Service), integrate with file systems (for doing things like grabbing images from IP Cameras and sending those up to your broker), and many other interesting use cases beyond just grabbing process data.

Over time we will show off some of these cool projects, find more interesting ones to share, and hopefully give you a lot of ideas you can use on your journey to fully understanding MQTT.

Onward and Upward!

This site will grow quickly with the secondary goal of becoming the primary MQTT resource on the internet. We have had a great time learning the ins and outs of everything MQTT over the years, are excited to share our knowledge, and help the rest of the world understand this often opaque technology!