Hi and Welcome to Steve’s Internet Guide.
In 2017 over 3 billion people where connected to the Internet (Wiki), and over the past 10 years the Internet has become just as important as TV, radio, and the telephone.

The use of the Internet,networks and related technologies is growing.

Today we have the Smart phone tomorrow the smart car and the smart home.

All of these devices will be made Smart by connecting them together via a home network and to the Internet.

Networking and Home Networking

Today’s home and office networks are built around the same protocols and technologies as the Internet.

The home network or home office network forms the hub for your internet connection allowing all devices,play stations, tablets, computers etc to connect together, and to share an Internet connection.

Home automation is becoming more popular and will result in many more devices being connected to home networks and the Internet.

With the growing use of Internet and network enabled devices there will a growing need for almost everyone to have a basic understanding of networking so that they can setup, configure, and use them.

Recommended Reading

• Networking and Home Networking basic Course
• How to Set up Your Home Network

The Internet of Things (IOT)

The first wave of the Internet involved connecting people to each other and people to information.

Today over 3 billion people are connected to the Internet.

The next wave of the Internet will involve connecting the physical world to the Internet, and machines to each other (M2M – Machine to machine).

Various estimates put the number of IOT (Internet of Things) devices to over 25 billion by 2025.

With the growing use of Internet and network enabled devices there will a growing need for almost everyone to have a basic understanding of networking and Internet technologies and services.

Networking Protocols

Devices communicate with each other using protocols. The protocol that connects your home devices and the Internet together is TCP/IP.

See The TCP/IP Model and Protocol Suite Explained for Beginners

In addition the the protocols that were designed at the start of the Internet new ones are being designed or re-deplyed to cater for the growth of machine-machine (M2M0 communication.

This site will focus on one of these called MQTT.

Introduction to the MQTT messaging protocol.

I expect this protocol to become as popular if not more popular than the http protocol which powers the modern day Web.

Recommended Reading

• MQTT Hosting,Brokers and Servers
• MQTT and IOT dashboards
• node-red course.

Questions

If you have any questions please ask

Best Regards Steve

Normally the Sonoff switches don’t support MQTT but you can buy flashed devices that run the Tasmota firmware that does.

The Sonoff-Tasmota firmware provides three interfaces: MQTT, web and serial that can be used for controlling the switch.

In this tutorial I will cover basic setup of the Sonoff Tasmota MQTT Basic Switch and how to use MQTT to control and configure the switch. (more…)

When I first starting working with computers everything was in ASCII.

However today working with networking protocols and network programming you will come across a variety of data and character encoding schemes.

In this tutorial we will look at basic encoding schemes used on computers and in the second part of the tutorial we look at how data is sent over a network. (more…)

The function node is used to run JavaScript code against the msg object.

The function node accepts a msg object as input and can return 0 or more message objects as output.

This message object must have a payload property (msg.payload), and usually has other properties depending on the proceeding nodes. (more…)

If you’re new to mongoDB and are looking to use it on one of your IOT projects then you might find my working notes useful.

Install –

• Manual links to install on multiple platforms
• How to Install mongoDB on Windows 10.

The database files are stored in c:\data\db on Windows (default) and in the folder /var/lib/mongodb on Linux (Raspberry pi). (more…)

In MQTT the process of sending messages is called publishing, and to receive messages an MQTT client must subscribe to an MQTT topic. (more…)