There are some great Arduino modules with integrated ESP-8266 wireless chips, some of the more popular modules are:

• Adafruit HUZZAH
• NodeMCU
• WeMos

These modules allow you to do some interesting IoT (Internet of Things) projects. To connect the Arduino modules to PCs, Raspberry Pi’s or Linux nodes that are a number of communication choices. MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport) is becoming one of the standards for this and it is pre-installed with Node-Red.

Plant Moisture Monitoring MQTT Example

For our example we wanted to do a simple plant moisture example that used a solar charger and an Arduino Wemos module. We then setup an MQTT server on our Node-Red Raspberry Pi with a web dashboard.

Our goal was to get the MQTT technologies working, with some moisture inputs (and not a final plant monitoring system).

Moisture Sensors

Moisture sensors are very low cost and they start at about $2. The basic moisture sensor has 3 inputs; VCC, GND, and AO. Some sensors also include a digital output with a potentiometer to adjust the digital 0-1 moisture limit.

Our Arduino plant moisture setup is good for testing but not a good long term solution. When voltage is applied long term to moisture sensors ionization in the soil will cause a combination of false reading and deterioration of the sensor plates. We plan to do a future project where we will use relays to turn the sensors on/off and we will include solenoid values in a watering system.

MQTT on Arduino

There are a number of excellent MQTT libraries for Arduino, for this example we used the PubSubClient library. This library can be installed from the Arduino IDE by selecting the menu items:

Sketch -> Add Library -> Manage Libraries

To get MQTT setup you’ll need to:

• define the SSID and password for your WAN
• define the IP address for the MQTT server (the Node Red/Raspberry Pi node)
• define some topic for the data

The nice thing about MQTT is that you can define topics for each of your data points. For this example we define the topic humidity to show the moisture sensor value, and msgtext to show the message (‘Needs Water’ or ‘).

Below is our sample Arduino code for passing the moisture data to our MQTT server.

/*
 Basic ESP8266 MQTT publish client example for a moisture sensor
*/
#include <ESP8266WiFi.h>
#include <PubSubClient.h>

// Update these with values suitable for your network.
const char* ssid = "YOUR_SSID_NAME";
const char* password = "YOUR_PASSWORD";
const char* mqtt_server = "YOUR_NODE_RED_IP";

WiFiClient espClient;
PubSubClient client(espClient);

void setup_wifi() {
  // Connecting to a WiFi network
  WiFi.begin(ssid, password);
  while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
    delay(500);
    Serial.print(".");
  }
  Serial.println("WiFi connected");
  Serial.println("IP address: ");
  Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());
}

void reconnect() {
  // Loop until we're reconnected
  Serial.println("In reconnect...");
  while (!client.connected()) {
    Serial.print("Attempting MQTT connection...");
    // Attempt to connect
    if (client.connect("Arduino_Moisture")) {
      Serial.println("connected");
    } else {
      Serial.print("failed, rc=");
      Serial.print(client.state());
      Serial.println(" try again in 5 seconds");
      delay(5000);
    }
  }
}

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  setup_wifi();
  client.setServer(mqtt_server, 1883);
}

void loop() {
  char msg[10];
  char msgtext[25];
  String themsg;
  if (!client.connected()) {
    reconnect();
  }
  
  int soil_moisture=analogRead(A0);  // read from analog pin A0
  Serial.print("analog value: ");
  Serial.println(soil_moisture);
  
  if((soil_moisture>300)&&(soil_moisture<700)) {
    Serial.println("Humid soil");
    sprintf(msgtext,"Humid soil",soil_moisture);
  } 
  else if ((soil_moisture>700)&&(soil_moisture<950)){
    Serial.println("Moist Soil");
    sprintf(msgtext,"Moist Soil",soil_moisture);
  }
  else if (soil_moisture <300) ){
    Serial.println("Needs water");    
    sprintf(msgtext,"Needs water",soil_moisture);
  }
  else
  {
      sprintf(msgtext,"Sensor Problem",soil_moisture);
  }

  sprintf(msg,"%i",soil_moisture);
  client.publish("humidity", msg);
  client.publish("soil", msgtext);
  delay(5000);
}

Node-Red

Node-Red is an excellent visual programming environment that is part of the Raspberry Pi base install. Node-Red is a simple tool to create your own Internet of Things applications. The base Node-Red installation includes MQTT interfacing components but it does not include an MQTT server.

If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi you can install Node-Red on Window, Mac OS or Linux systems. I’ve had good results running Node-Red on a very old low end laptop running Xubuntu, (see steps 1-3 in this linked guide).

MQTT Server on Node-Red

There are a number of free internet MQTT servers (iot.eclipse.org) that can be used or an MQTT server can be loaded directly on a local server (i.e. Mosquito).

Mosca is a standalone MQTT server that can be installed directly into Node-Red. The Mosca Node-Red component can be either installed at the command line by:

cd $HOME/.node-red

npm install node-red-contrib-mqtt-broker

Or the component can be install within the Node-Red web interface by selecting the “manage palette” option, and then search for mosca.

After Mosca is installed, all that is required is that a “mosca” node needs to be dragged and dropped into the Node-Red project.

To connect the Arduino module to Node-Red mqtt inputs are added to the project.  The Arduino topics are defined in Node-Red by double-clicking on the mqtt node and then define the topic to match the Arduino topic.

After the MQTT connections are configured Web dashboards can present the final data. The Web dashboards offer a number of different components that could be used for this example I used a gauge and a text node.

To compile and view the Node-Red application, click on the Deploy button on the right side of the menu bar. To access the web dashboard enter: http://your-ip:1880/ui . Below is a example of what you should see.

Final Thoughts

The Mosca MQTT server component allows for a simple standalone architecture to connect wireless Arduino modules into a Node-Red IoT solution.

We can also load Node-Red on Raspberry Pi data collection nodes, and have them publish data to a central Node-Red server.