MQTT Distributor Module

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Travis Cox downloads, installs, and configures the MQTT Distributor Module for Ignition. The module enables MQTT clients and applications to securely connect, publish, and subscribe to data, supplying data to both operational and business applications throughout the enterprise.


Video Transcript:

Travis: In this session, we're going to install and configure the MQTT Distributor Module for Ignition, which is an MQTT server, or often called a broker, complying with a 3.1.1 MQTT protocol Oasis standard. It enables MQTT clients and applications to securely connect, publish, and subscribe to data, supplying data to both operational and business applications throughout the enterprise. The first thing we need to do is download the MQTT Distributor Module from Ignition's website. And for that we go to the Downloads area, and we can select 'Other Operating Systems’ or ‘Other Versions', and find the Ignition version we're looking for. We're gonna go to the ‘Strategic Partner Modules’ where we'll find all of the Cirrus Link modules, and there we can download the MQTT Distributor Module.

I've already done that; there's my Downloads folder. Now I'm gonna go back to Ignition on my local machine where we go into the configuration area, go to the ‘Modules’ section, and there I can click 'Install or Upgrade a Module' to install the MQTT Distributor. I'm gonna choose that downloaded module, install it, we have to accept the license agreement, as well as install certificate. And that's it. We now have an MQTT server built into Ignition. It's really simple to get up and running.

There are some settings for the MQTT Distributor Module over here on the left-hand side. Go to ‘Settings,’ that's where I can configure the Non-TLS and the TLS ports. Which by default, Non-TLS is 1883 and the TLS is 8883. We can also enable Websockets port as well. We can go over here to our ‘Users’ where we can identify users that can connect and we can provide them access control lists for what they're allowed to read and write. There's already one user built into the MQTT Distributor Module by default, which is admin, and the password for that is "changeme". Of course we can go in there and edit this and we can identify new users.

But that's it. We now can have client applications connect and publish and subscribe to data. We're gonna do that by using the MQTT FX product. You can download this from the internet, and this allows us to play around with sending messages back and forth so we can see it. I'm gonna go ahead and go to the settings. I'm gonna connect to the MQTT server on my local machine over 1883, and I'm going to specify the credentials, which is the “admin” and “changeme” username and password. Now that I have that, I can connect, as you can see, we are now connected to the broker, ready to go, and we can publish and subscribe. Going to go over here to ‘Subscribe’. I'm going to subscribe on a topic called test message. We're going to go back here to ‘Publish’, and I'm going to publish on that same topic. Here is the message. So once I do that, I should come over here and we can see that the message is coming in.

So now we know, the MQTT server is up and running and ready to go. Now we can look at using the MQTT's Transmission and Engine modules to publish data from Ignition.