The Problem MQTT Solves
Imagine 50 machines in a factory, each sending sensor data to a central server. If every machine opens a connection to the server and pushes data every second, you have 50 persistent connections, each needing to handle retries, disconnections, and data buffering. MQTT solves this with a publish-subscribe architecture.
How MQTT Works
Three components: Publisher (your edge device or PLC gateway), Broker (a server that routes messages — Mosquitto, HiveMQ, or AWS IoT Core), Subscriber (your database writer, dashboard, or alert system). Publishers send messages to Topics — string paths like factory/line1/machine3/temperature.
QoS Levels
QoS 0: Fire and forget. Message may be lost. Use for high-frequency sensor data. QoS 1: At least once delivery. Message may be duplicated. Use for alarm events. QoS 2: Exactly once. Slowest but guaranteed. Use for production counts that must not be double-counted.
Practical Setup for Indian Factories
Run Mosquitto (free, open-source) on a local industrial PC as your factory broker. Use Node-RED (free, visual) to subscribe to MQTT topics and write to MySQL. Deploy Grafana (free) on top of MySQL for dashboards. Total software cost: ₹0.
MQTT + Mosquitto + Node-RED + MySQL + Grafana is the most cost-effective factory IoT stack for Indian manufacturers. All open-source, all battle-tested, deployable on a ₹15,000 industrial PC.
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