Create an IoT ThingsBoard Dashboard with Raspberry Pi PLC & MQTT

The type of open-source license is becoming more and more common in industry 4.0. Whether they are open source projects, such as open-source hardware or open-source software, they turn out to be more and more searched words on Google.

In today's post, we will create a dashboard for open-source software, such as ThingBoard.io, through which we can visualize the data of our application with IoT through MQTT.

So, once we know what is the ThingsBoard open-source platform, let's follow these steps in order to create our dashboard:

1. Install ThingsBoard on industrial Raspberry PLC >
2. Install Docker:
   1. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
   2. curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
   3. sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}
      
   4. groups ${USER}
      
      
3. Start with ThingsBoard >
   1. Follow step 1
   2. Follow step 2
   3. Select MQTT
   4. Install Mosquitto in your industrial Raspberry Pi PLC
   From your Raspberry Pi industrial PLC with the Mosquitto installed, you will have to run the following command:
   
   
   mosquitto_pub -d -q 1 -h "IP-HOST-ADDRESS-HERE" -p "1883" -t "v1/devices/me/telemetry" -u "ACCES-TOKEN-HERE" -m MESSAGE-HERE
   
   
   
   If you go to "Devices", in the line where your device is, there is a shield at the right-side. If you select "Access token", you can modify it or get it from there in order to set it after the -u parameter.
   
   
   In the -h parameter, add the hostname. In our case, we will set the IP address of the open source PLC Raspberry Pi: 10.10.10.20.
   
   So:
   mosquitto_pub -d -q 1 -h "10.10.10.20" -p "1883" -t "v1/devices/me/telemetry" -u "is-access-token" -m {"temperature":23}

Go back to your PC and follow the steps until step 3.4, in order to add a chart widget with the incoming data from MQTT.