I'm curious, what role does MQTT play in IoT systems? How does it work in simple terms? What advantages does it offer for data transmission? Is it necessary even for small projects? Do you think it's genuinely useful or just unnecessary complexity?
How is the MQTT protocol used in IoT projects?
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I remember recently when I was working on a temperature monitoring system, MQTT turned out to be much lighter than I expected and really helped simplify things. The setup was pretty straightforward—ESP32 collected the data, sent it to Mosquitto on a Raspberry Pi, and then Node-RED visualized it.
At its core, MQTT works by having devices "publish" data from sensors, while the receiving side "subscribes" to it. The publish side can disconnect right after sending, and the subscribe side doesn’t need to stay connected all the time. That’s probably why it’s so stable even in areas with unstable Wi-Fi. For small projects, if you have a lot of sensors, using MQTT instead of direct TCP makes management way easier. At first, I thought, "Why use MQTT when there’s Vanti?" but once I actually tried it, it made things so much smoother.
MQTT is actually one of the must-haves in IoT projects. I used it when working with temperature and humidity sensors in home automation. Its biggest advantage is that it works with low bandwidth—you don’t even have to worry about battery life while continuously sending data from sensors. Simply put; publishers (sensors) can send data at any time via "topics," and subscribers (e.g., Node-RED or a dashboard) only subscribe to the topics they’re interested in.
It’s useful even in small projects, especially if you’re someone like me who wants everything modular. Mine started with just a few nodes, and as the system grew, I added a Raspberry Pi MQTT broker. It’s not complicated at all—just advantages. If you want to transmit data reliably and simply, you should give MQTT a try—I highly recommend it!