Once a read-only Grafana dashboard was up and running, I had end-to-end data flow from voltage measurement to a graph of those measurements over time. This was a good first draft, from here I can pick and choose where to start refining the system. First thought: it was cool that an ESP8266 Arduino could log data straight to an InfluxDB2 server, but I don't think that is the best way to go.

InfluxDB is a great database to track historical data, but sometimes I want just the most recent measurement. I don't want to have to spin up a full InfluxDB client library and perform a query just to retrieve a single data point. That would be a ton of unnecessary overhead! Even worse, due to the overhead, not everything has an InfluxDB client library and I don't want to be limited to the subset that does. And finally, tracking historical data is only one aspect of the system, at some point I want to take action based on data and measurements. InfluxDB doesn't help at all for that.

To improve these fronts, I'm going to add a MQTT broker to my home network in the form of a docker container running Eclipse Mosquitto. MQTT is a simple publish/scribe system. The voltage measuring node I've built out of an ESP8266 is a publisher, and InfluxDB is a subscriber for that data. If I want the most recent measurement, I can subscribe to the same data source and see it at the same time InfluxDB does.

I've read the Hackaday MQTT primer, and I understand it is a popular tool for these types of projects. It's been on my to-do list ever since and this is the test project for playing with it. Putting MQTT into this system lets me start small with a single publisher and a single subscriber. If I expand on this system, it is easy to add more to my home MQTT network.

As a popular and lightweight protocol, MQTT enjoys a large support ecosystem. While not everything has an InfluxDB client library, almost everything has a MQTT client library. Including ESP8266 Arduino, and InfluxDB in the form of a Telegraf plugin. But after looking over that page, I understand it is designed for direct consumption and has little (no?) options for data transformation. This is where Node-RED enters the discussion.

My simple docker-compose.yml for running Mosquitto:

version: "3.8"

services:
  mqtt-broker:
    image: eclipse-mosquitto:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 1883:1883
      - 9001:9001
    volumes:
      - ./config:/mosquitto/config
      - ./data:/mosquitto/data
      - ./log:/mosquitto/log