Project 24.1: Streaming Live Data to ThingsBoard

Introduction

In the first part of this project, you will set up your Mosquitto, ThingsBoard, and Firebase environments. You will begin by setting up your MQTT protocol to produce temperature and humidity data. Next, you will ensure that the data produced by the MQTT protocol is published correctly to ThingsBoard. Finally, you will create a new project and a Realtime database in Firebase and send the temperature and humidity data to it.

This project is worth a total of 100 points.

Instructions

Step 1

In a Terminal window, create a new folder called Project_24_Docker. Below is the YAML code for the docker-compose.yml file. Place it inside the Project_24_Docker folder. Note, you can also just copy and paste this code into the docker-compose.yml file.

version: "3"
services:
  broker:
    image: eclipse-mosquitto
    volumes:
      - "./mosquitto:/mosquitto"
      - "./mosquitto/config:/mosquitto/config"
      - "./mosquitto/data:/mosquitto/data"
      - "./mosquitto/log:/mosquitto/log"
    ports:
      - "1883:1883"
      - "9001:9001"

Inside the Project_24_Docker folder, create a folder titled mosquitto. Inside the mosquitto folder, create three more sub-folders titled as follows: config, data, and log. Create a mosquitto.config file and place it inside the config folder. Put the below configurations within it.

allow_anonymous true
listener 1883
persistence false
persistence_location /mosquitto/data/
log_dest file /mosquitto/log/mosquitto.log

See the image below, which depicts the required folders and files:

└── Project_24_Docker
    ├── docker-compose.yml
    └── mosquitto
        ├── config
        ├── data
        └── log

Provide a screenshot to show that you correctly created all of the required folders and that you placed the docker-compose.yml and mosquitto.config files in the Project_24_Docker and config folders, respectively.

Step 2

In a terminal, navigate to the Project_24_Docker folder and run the command below to initialize your Mosquitto container:

docker-compose up

Provide a screenshot of your Docker GUI to show that you have successfully initialized the Mosquitto container.

Step 3

In a local Terminal window, run the command below to install the Paho MQTT Python client library locally:

pip install paho-mqtt

Provide a screenshot to show that you have successfully installed the Paho MQTT Python client library.

Step 4

In a Terminal window, navigate to your home folder. Enter the command below to navigate the your home folder: cd.

Inside of your home folder, create two folders named .mytb-data and .mytb-logs.

Provide a screenshot to show that you created the .mytb-data and .mytb-logs folders in your home folder.

Step 5

Inside the same location where you created the Project_24_Docker folder, create a new folder titled Project_24_MQTT. Inside the Project_24_MQTT folder, create a new subfolder titled ThingsBoard. Download the docker-compose.yml file and place it inside the ThingsBoard folder. Also inside of the ThingsBoard folder, create two folders named .mytb-data and .mytb-logs. Below is the file-tree layout that should result.

Project_24_MQTT
├── .mytb-data
├── .mytb-logs
└── ThingsBoard
    └── docker-compose.yml

Copy this code into the docker-compose.yml file.

version: "2.2"
services:
  mytb:
    restart: always
    image: "thingsboard/tb-postgres"
    ports:
      - "8080:9090"
      - "9883:1883"
      - "5683:5683/udp"
    environment:
      TB_QUEUE_TYPE: in-memory
    volumes:
      - ~/.mytb-data:/data
      - ~/.mytb-logs:/var/log/thingsboard

Step 6

In a Terminal window, navigate to the ThingsBoard folder that you created in Step 4 and run the command below to initialize your ThingsBoard container:

docker-compose up

If the ThingsBoard container does not spin up correctly, then change the ports on line 8 to 1883:1883 and try to spin up the container again.

Provide a screenshot of your Docker GUI to show that you have successfully initialized the ThingsBoard container.

Step 7

Inside the Project_24_MQTT folder, create a new subfolder titled paho-mqtt. Create the TBPublish.py file, as shown below, and place it inside the paho-mqtt folder.

import time
import random
import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt
import json
PORT = 9883
THINGSBOARD_HOST = 'localhost'
ACCESS_TOKEN = 'DHT11_DEMO_TOKEN'

# Data capture and upload interval in seconds.

sensor_data = {'temperature': 0}

client = mqtt.Client()
# Set access token
client.username_pw_set(ACCESS_TOKEN)

# Connect to ThingsBoard using default MQTT port and 60 seconds keep-alive interval
client.connect(THINGSBOARD_HOST, PORT, 60)
client.loop_start()

try:
    while True:
        temperature = random.randint(0, 100)
        
        print(f"Temperature: {temperature} humidity: {humidity}")
        sensor_data['temperature'] = temperature
        sensor_data['humidity'] = humidity

        # Sending humidity and temperature data to ThingsBoard
        client.publish('v1/devices/me/telemetry', json.dumps(sensor_data), 1)
        time.sleep(3)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    pass

client.loop_stop()
client.disconnect()

Open the TBPublish.py file in VS Code.

See the text below, which depicts the required folders and files:

Project_24_MQTT
├── ThingsBoard
│   └── docker-compose.yml
└── paho-mqtt
    └── TBpublish.py

Modify the sensor_data dictionary by adding another key, humidity, with a corresponding value equal to 0. Inside the while loop, add a statement to generate random integer values between 50 and 100. Assign these values to the humidity variable.

Provide a screenshot to show that you created the paho-mqtt folder and modified the code inside the TBPublish.py file to add the humidity key with the correct values assigned to the humidity variable.

Step 8

Open a Terminal window in VS Code. Run the TBPublish.py file.

Provide a screenshot to show that your code is correctly producing temperature and humidity data.

Step 9

In a browser window, navigate to http://localhost:8080/. Log in to ThingsBoard using the credentials below:

Login: tenant@thingsboard.org
Password: tenant

Provide a screenshot to show that you successfully logged in to ThingsBoard by using the credentials provided.

Step 10

In ThingsBoard, from the menu on the left, select “Devices”. You should see an existing device called DHT11 Demo Device. This device publishes data produced by an MQTT protocol to ThingsBoard. In other words, this device is able to read the data produced by the TBPublish.py file and send it to ThingsBoard.

Open the DHT11 Demo Device by selecting it. Navigate to the Latest Telemetry tab to see the latest telemetry.

Provide a screenshot of the data in the latest telemetry tab to show that the DHT11 Demo Device is publishing the data produced by the TBPublish.py file to ThingsBoard.

Step 11

Navigate to the main page of Firebase. Follow the steps in Video 24.3 to add a new project called module24Project.

Step 12

Add a Realtime Database with temperature document to load data from thing board into.

Step 13

Add a firebase rule node to Root Rule Chain in Thingsboard. It should be an API call node. It should be connected to the switch with a label.