Wooed by the possibility to put LEDs on ALL THE THINGS and control them with an app, I bought my first (and second and third...) arduino this year and haven’t looked back. But, as a IoT newbie, I defaulted to what I knew as a frontend developer. I applied the libraries I was familiar with from my daily work to solve my IoT problems with lackluster results. Things kind of worked, but the connections were flaky and it crashed a lot. It felt like there had to be something out there that was a better fit for communicating from the web to hardware. In my pursuit for a minimalist solution that could handle poor network connections and had implementations in C++ and JavaScript, I found the MQTT protocol.

MQTT is a lightweight messaging architecture for sending data between hardware and other devices where a small code footprint and performance in poor network conditions are crucial. In this talk, we’ll look what exactly what MQTT is, how I use it in my own art/wearable project, and why you should check it out for your next hardware project.