Home automation has gained a lot of popularity nowadays as it enables people to live a smart life.  With MQTTRoute integrated into the home automation platform you can easily develop your own home automation system. OpenHAB is one such open source platform you  can use to automate your home devices. Here is a step by step tutorial on how to integrate MQTTRoute with the OpenHab.

MQTTRoute integration with openHAB

OpenHAB : Installation

OpenHAB can be run on different versions of macOS and Windows and many different variants of Linux (Ubuntu, Raspbian, etc.).

Prerequisites : You need to get any of the JAVA platform installed mentioned below

• Azul Zulu
• Oracle Java
• AdoptOpenJDK

Now download & install Java 11

Check your current java version by opening a command line

java -version

Then Set up variants by Downloading and extract a platform independent zip archive: macOS, Windows, Linux.

Now install the downloaded packages using the below link

https://www.openhab.org/docs/installation/openhabian.html

Installation in Raspberry pi

For installing OpenHAB on Raspberry Pi, first, download the appropriate OpenHabian Disk Image for your Raspberry Pi. Here I have choosen Raspberry pi 3.

Go to https://etcher.io/ and install Etcher on your computer.

Once installation is done, open Etcher select the openhabian disk image you have downloaded in the first step.

Choose the right SD card and click Flash. Before this have your SD card formatted.

Insert the SD card on your pi & connect an Ethernet cable & power it up. To configure wi-fi, please check this post.

Once done, navigate either to the http://localhost:8080 or https://localhost:8443

It is better to use https://localhost:8443 as MQTTRoute UI also opens in the default port 8080.

OpenHAB : Configuration

First & foremost sign up with the new account.

Follow the steps mentioned by Open HAB. You can either finish up with the configurations or can be done it later.

Once you finish your set up. Let us move on to Add-ons which is present under the settings tab.

• Click Bindings under Add-ons
• Select MQTT-binding in the given list.

Your MQTT-binding set up is completed now.

OpenHAB : MQTTRoute Integration

Complete your download & installation step of MQTTRoute.

https://www.bevywise.com/mqtt-broker/help.html#installation

You can check the link for step by step procedure for installation.

Once done, go to Bevywise/MQTTRoute/conf  You need to enable authentication in broker.conf file. 

[AUTHENTICATION]

AUTHENTICATION_ENABLED = YES

# YES || NO

 

Save your changes.

Now move to the openHAB UI.

• Let us add MQTT Broker using Things tab.
• Add things by clicking the + icon present at the bottom.
• Now select MQTT Broker as Thing type from the list.
• The configuration need to be set correctly to make MQTT Broker & OpenHAB communication.
• Click show advanced.
• Provide IP or host name of MQTTRoute 127.0.0.1
• By default port will be set as 1883. In case if TLS is enabled in the broker.conf file. You need to change the port here.
• Now enter username and password which is provided in the security tab of MQTTRoute UI.

• Once done click submit. If your configurations are set correctly the toggle button will show Online. You can view the OpenHAB device connected to the MQTT Broker in Devices tab. You can now connect your home devices in the devices tab of OpenHAB UI.

Hope this article provide you a detailed view on openHAB integration with MQTT Broker. Try setting up with the home automation platforms by yourself & integrating MQTTRoute to control your home devices.

Download MQTT Broker now for FREE to get started with your Home automation set up. The new version of MQTT Broker, MQTTRoute 3.2 is available now with High availability support, $SYS topic & more.

The technological world is moving faster with its most popular innovations and home automation is one such innovation which everyone loved or liked to have. Home automation systems enable us to automate our smart home devices present at home.  With MQTTRoute integrated into the home automation platform you can easily develop your own home automation system. There are numerous open source automation platforms available in the market. And among them, Home Assistant have stood out as the most familiar choice. Here is a step by step tutorial on how to integrate MQTTRoute with the home assistant & OpenHab.

MQTTRoute integration with home assistant

Home Assistant : Installation

Installation can be done in four different methods

• Home assistant operating system
• Home assistant container
• Home assistant supervised
• Home assistant core

You can select any method based on your convenience.

Select your preferred operating system from the below mentioned list

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

In Raspberry Pi :

The first step is to install Hass.io to start running Home Assistant in Raspberry pi.

https://home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/

Navigate to the above link & choose the appropriate image. Here I have choosen Raspberry pi 3.

Go to https://etcher.io/ and install Etcher on your computer.

Once installation is done, open Etcher select the hassio image you have downloaded in the first step.

Choose the right SD card and click Flash. Before this have your SD card formatted.

Insert the SD card on your pi & connect an Ethernet cable & power it up. To configure wi-fi, please check this post.

Now access Open Habian user interface in browser using http://your-pi-ip-address:8080. Replace your-pi-ip-address with your Raspberry PI IP.

In Linux

Let us see how to set up home assistant in linux with docker.

You have to update the linux first

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Now install docker using the below commands

Before docker installation it is necessary to install some additional packages

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common

Now, to ensure validity of the download, add a GPG key or docker to our system

 curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add –

To set up stable repository

 echo \
  “deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \ $(lsb_release -cs) stable” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

Now install docker engine

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Now run hello world command to test the successful installation of docker

 sudo docker run hello-world

On successful installation, you will receive the below message

Hello from Docker! This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.

Install Hass.io & Home assistant

Hass.io is an own operating of home assistant.

Before installation you need to add some additional packages

 sudo apt-get install apparmor-utils avahi-daemon dbus jq network-manager socat

 Now change the terminal to root

 sudo su

 And then add the below command to install Hassio & home assistant.

sudo curl -sL “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Kanga-Who/home-assistant/master/supervised-installer.sh” | bash -s

The installation of Home assistant has completed. By default home assistant runs on port 8123. You can navigate to http://homeassistant.local:8123/ or use your IP to reach home assistant portal.

Let us continue with the onboarding

Home assistant : Onboarding

This is to configure the home assistant.

For more details you can navigate to

https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/onboarding/

Create your account with a home assistant.

Set up your configurations.

Home Assistant : MQTTRoute Integration

Click the configuration tab present at the left side of the Home Assistant UI.

The integrations page in the configurations panel shows you all your configured integrations. When each integration is done setting up, it will ask you to put the new devices in areas. Areas allow you to organize all the devices in your home.

Now let us see how to integrate MQTTRoute with a home assistant.

Download the latest version of MQTTRoute from the below link.

https://www.bevywise.com/mqtt-broker/download.html

Once done set up & install MQTTRoute

https://www.bevywise.com/mqtt-broker/help.html#installation

You can check the link for step by step procedure for installation.

Once done, go to Bevywise/MQTTRoute/conf  You need to enable authentication in broker.conf file. 

[AUTHENTICATION]

AUTHENTICATION_ENABLED = YES

# YES || NO

 

Save your changes.

Now move to the home assistant UI. Navigate to the integrations tab.

Click “Add integration” button.

Select MQTT from the list.

You will view the screen asking for the broker details

Enter broker IP or host name as 127.0.0.1

By default port will be set as 1883. In case if TLS is enabled in the broker.conf file, you need to change the port here.

Now enter username and password which is provided in the security tab of MQTTRoute UI.

Once done click submit. If your configurations are set correctly you will receive a success message.

You can view the home assistant device connected to the MQTT Broker in Devices tab & list of message published. You can now connect your home devices in the devices tab of Home assistant UI.

Hope this article provide you a detailed view on home assistant integration with MQTT Broker. Try setting up with the home automation platforms by yourself & integrating MQTTRoute to control your home devices.

Download MQTT Broker now for FREE to get started with your Home automation set up. The new version of MQTT Broker, MQTTRoute 3.2 is available now with High availability support, $SYS topic & more.

MQTT is one of the most widely adopted protocols today in the IoT Arena. There are a lot of MQTT Brokers available for your solution implementation.  Choosing the right one that fits your criteria makes your project more than 50% complete. Developers should evaluate and lay out distinct quality aspects of all available Brokers to make a right choice. In an article earlier this year, we wrote about How to choose a perfect MQTT server for your implementation. Bevywise MQTTRoute is a commercial MQTT server built using C and python. Similarly,  Mosquitto is one of the fastest open source broker built on C. This article gives a high level overview of the MQTT Broker comparison between MQTTRoute and Mosquitto.

MQTT Compliance

Both Mosquitto and Bevywise are built as per MQTT protocol specification like publish message format, command messages, QoS(Quality of Service), retain, Wild card topics and error handling etc.

MQTT Security

Security of a broker is largely determined by the user configuration and only to a lesser extent by the broker’s security features. These include authentication and authorization mechanisms, as well as encryption support. In that case both MQTT Brokers support high level device authentication & TLS/SSL MQTT security. With the recent update, Bevywise MQTTRoute comes with the custom authentication functionality to execute centralized identity management / authentication.

High Availability

MQTT Broker must be highly available in order to never miss / loss any MQTT data. It should be up and running without any failure and hence you need MQTT clusters for it. In that case, Bevywise MQTTRoute supports clustering which can be used to set up 99.99% high availability MQTT cluster. As of now Mosquitto doesn’t handle high availability in it.

MQTT Data Persistence

IOT / IIoT is not about communication. It is about storing data for future analysis and decision-making. Mosquitto by default process all the message communication in memory. There is an option to store data of subscription into a file (mosquitto.db). But this file cannot be used outside the application. However, MQTTRoute comes with a default option to store data into MySQL, SQLite & PostgreSQL.  We recommend MySQL for deployments and the application you are building can also query the database in parallel. In addition MQTTRoute allows you to write data into ElasticSearch, MongoDB or any other storage using the plugin system built into the it.

MQTT Dashboard

One of the critical issue in the MQTT Implementation today is that the manager applications are built over data received by an MQTT client that subscribe to #. But, this is not the right as the meta information of the data is lost. So this mandates the need for the Broker to be integral part of the application. Keeping this in mind, we have built the UI into the MQTT Broker. We have built a comprehensive MQTT Dashboard as part of the MQTTRoute as well as the Platform. Also, MQTTRoute supports creating multiple dashboards with some pre-built widgets intended to provide better visualization of data. However, Mosquitto does not have any User interface as the data persistence itself is not available. There are some third party User interfaces which are built as a client.

Customization

Above all, The default web interface of the MQTTRoute can be customized as needed. The Product can be white labelled. Mosquitto as a open source MQTT broker can be customized to a larger extent. But the customization is more on the C layer for the Mosquitto and all the building blocks over it need to be recreated. Bevywise MQTTRoute on the other hand allows customization at the appliation layer. Some of the customization includes changing the User interface, advanced visualization, transforming data before storage. Moreover, Bevywise MQTTRoute is not just a Broker, it is a complete IoT application suite with the extendable custom hooks. The custom hooks include Custom UI server, Custom scheduler, Custom data store & Custom authentication.

Integration

Data Hooks, REST API and ML/AI Integration are the three major integration end points of the Bevywise MQTTRoute. MQTTRoute makes a huge leap ahead when you want to build an application over the Mosquitto. With the support of AI/ML integration you can add a ML algorithm into MQTTRoute to automate your machine learning process. Other than REST API’s, Bevywise MQTT server can be customizable to integrate with other MQTT based tools like Google pub/sub, Redis, tableau, modbus and more. Besides that, the cost and the effort spent on customization will be very minimal when compared to Mosquitto.

MQTT Broker Performance Comparison 

Performance of MQTT Broker depends on two main metrics one is the maximum sustainable throughput and the other is the average latency. The first metric is the maximum sustainable throughput at which the Broker is able to process all communicated messages. In terms of sustainability, Mosquitto is built on C and Bevywise MQTTRoute is built on a combination of C & Python for easy extendability and performance. Mosquitto is the fastest MQTT server available today when run as just a message broker. Bevywise MQTTRoute has a throughput at par with the Mosquitto.

The next one is the average latency from publisher to subscriber in a given scenario. Short latencies are important for many IoT applications, where live monitoring of data is desired. In terms of latency, both has a has lower latency/message delivery time across all QOSes. And also, MQTTRoute has the exposure of better latency (less round the trip time) than Mosquitto in QOS 0. To know more on MQTT Broker performance, have a look at the performance comparison study done by University of Szeged, Hungary.

Support & Consulting

MQTTRoute comes with a FREE Support where in we do consluting for your implementation while you will not be getting these supports on the Open Source Brokers. We also provide FREE community support for FREE users. Read more about our support policy.

MQTT Broker comparison Table

Features	MQTTRoute	Mosquitto
Protocol	MQTT, Web socket	MQTT, WebSocket
Visualization of Data	In built Dashboard with details of Devices level. Manage devices with send command, create Rules via UI. Multiple dashboard & widgets support. Customizable.	thrid party plugin
Security	TLS/SSL, device level Authentication, Custom Authentication	TLS / SSL , device level authentication
Inbuilt Storage Options	MySQL / SQLite / PostgreSQL Allows Third-party application to read.	Store data in-memory & File Only for Internal purpose
Extendable data Storage	Extension based Storage using Custom_storage option. Prebuilt connectors available in Github.	third party plugins for Storage
OS	Windows, Windows server, Linux, Mac and Raspberry Pi	Linux, Mac, Windows and BSD
Rule Engine	YES. Custom Rules can be added from the User Interface.	No
Error Log	YES. Time Out errors , Authentication, Packet errors are deducted and shown on the UI.	Yes, Enabled at the conf file and show in the Terminal
Localization	Yes. Option to customize to any language	No
Clustering	Yes.	No. One used as a single cluster
SaaS based	Yes. IoT Platform supports SaaS based Scalable architecture	No.
Throttling	Developed and will be available soon	Yes
Complete MQTT Standard Support	Yes	Yes
Integration	REST API , Data Plugins, ML/AI	Only DATA Plugins
Docker Support	Yes	Yes
Whitelabel	Yes	Yes
Open source	No	Yes
Built on	C / Python language	C language
MQTT version	Current support MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 coming soon	Current support MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 coming soon
Support	24×7 live support via Telephone, Whattsapp, Email.	Forum support

 

The overall MQTT Broker comparison between MQTTRoute & Mosquitto will help you choose the best one for your IoT implementation.

You can try the Bevywise MQTTRoute by downloading it FREE now. The new version of MQTT server, MQTTRoute 3.2 is available to support $SYS topic, High availability & more.

 

Must Read Other Related Post

• Docker MQTT Broker for easy service manageability
• Choosing Best MQTT Broker for your IoT Implementation Lower Power consumption
• MQTT vs REST from IoT Implementation perspective
• Creating SSL Certificates for Secure MQTT communication
• MQTT Broker integration using REST API

Feel free to write to support for any questions / suggestions.