JSON, MQTT, PubSub and OpenHAB

Usually I communicate between my various nodes (arduino, esp8266) with MQTT and OpenHAB being the interface. Simple, just one string command per message. Now there comes a moment that it seems better or more convenient, to send more commands in one MQTT message, and that is where JSON comes in. JSON messages are basically an organized string and MQTT is good in sending strings.
Author of the Pubsub library Nick O’Leary’s advice on sending JSON’s is as follows:

However, you need a few tricks before you can send a string variable.

I started off by using the ArduinoJson library to make my JSON’s, but I was not quite happy with that. There are various ways to do it and you end up with some sort of data/char array.

Supposedly you could send that with "client.publish(topic, (char*) payload.c_str())". But for various reasons that didnt suit me so I used another method.

As I was a bit unhappy about adding the ArduinoJson library just to make a JSON string, I thought it would be  best to simply compile the string myself and send that. I am not saying there is no better way… and if there is, please do tell, but this worked for me.

Anyway, let’s start with something simple, I have a LiPo battery feeding an ESP8266 and in openHAB I like to keep track of the voltage of the battery, but I also like to display the Percentage of the battery charged. Ofcourse I can calculate the latter in OpenHAB, but i prefer to have the ESP8266 do that.
Note: the below calculation is for a Wemos D1, with a 100k  resistor  in series with A0. Together with the  residing voltage divider it makes a 100k/(100k+220k+100k) = 1/4.2 voltage divider,  reducing a 4.2Volt voltage to 1 Volt. Therefore a reading of 1023 (=1V) on the A0 port correlates with 4.2 Volt on the LiPo battery)

voltage=analogRead(A0);// (mind you, this is 1 V max)
voltage=voltage/1023.0;// so 1V max renders "1" here
voltage=voltage*4.2;// We want a max of 4.2, so multiply
percent=100*voltage/4.2;// and calculate percentage

The JSON string I need to make, will look as follows

{"Voltage": voltage_value,"Percent": percent_value}

to insert a quote in a string you need to use the backslash as an escape character, so, we make the JSON string as follows:

String payload="{\"Voltage\":"+String(voltage)+ ",\"Percent\":"+String(percent)+"} ";

So now we have the Stringvariable “payload” that we have to send via PubSub.

There may be various ways to do that, I did it as follows:

payload.toCharArray(data, (payload.length() + 1));
client.publish("home/battery",data);

You could probably also use: client.publish("home/battery", payload.c_str());, but I didn’t^*).
So, once in openHAB it is quite easy to process the the JSON, once the proper transformation Add-on is installed.

In the items file it then looks like this:

Number battery_garden "Battery Garden [%.1f V]"  (Back_Garden, batteries) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/battery:state:JSONPATH($.Voltage)]"}
Number battery_garden_pct "Battery Garden [%.0f %%]"  (Back_Garden, batteries) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/battery:state:JSONPATH($.Percent)]"}

And on screen like this:

OK, let’s try that with the reading results of a DHT11. Sure, there might be many reasons why you would want to send the humidity reading and temperature reasing as two different MQTT strings, but for arguments sake let’ s try it as a JSON.

We will first read the DHT11 sensor,then we will create a JSON that looks like {“Temperature”: 20.0, “Humidity”: 68}  with 20.0 and 68 of course just snapshot  examples. Subsequently we will create the MQTT message and display it in openHAB

float humid_coop = dht.readHumidity();
float temp_coop = dht.readTemperature();
String payload="{\"Humidity\":"+String(humid_coop)+ ",\"Temperature\":"+String(temp_coop)+"} ";
payload.toCharArray(data, (payload.length() + 1));
client.publish("home/coop", data);

and then in the itemsfile:

Number Humidity_Coop "Humidity Coop [%.0f %%]" (coop) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/coop:state:JSONPATH($.Humidity)]"}
and
Number Temperature_coop "Temperatuur [%.2f °C]" (coop) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/coop:state:JSONPATH($.Temperature)]"}

Let’s now have a look at sending more than just two data  values. Suppose you have an I/O chip (or more) that lets you read 12 channels at the same time, you could ofcourse make a JSON like this: {“channel1” : value1, “channel2″:value2,  ……..”channel12”: value12}, but that seems to send a lot of unnecessary data, so we will create the following JSON:

{"data":[value1,.............value12]}
We do that as follows

String payload="{\"data\":["+String(ana0)+","+String(ana1)+","+String(ana2)+","+String(ana3)+","+String(ana4)+","+String(ana5)+","+String(ana6)+","+String(ana7)+","+String(ana8)+","+String(ana9)+","+String(ana10)+","+String(ana11)+ "]}";
payload.toCharArray(data, (payload.length() + 1));
client.publish("home/json", data);

in the MQTT channel in the items file we will now use a slightly different JSON format. The data will now be read by index number like:

JSONPATH($.data[0])


the full itemsfile then will be

Number Moisture1 "Moisture 1 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[0])]"}
Number Moisture2 "Moisture 2 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[1])]"}
Number Moisture3 "Moisture 3 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[2])]"}
Number Moisture4 "Moisture 4 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[3])]"}
Number Moisture5 "Moisture 5 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[4])]"}
Number Moisture6 "Moisture 6 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[5])]"}
Number Moisture7 "Moisture 7 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[6])]"}
Number Moisture8 "Moisture 8 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[7])]"}
Number Moisture9 "Moisture 9 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[8])]"}
Number Moisture10 "Moisture 10 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[9])]"}
Number Moisture11 "Moisture 11 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[10])]"}
Number Moisture12 "Moisture 12 [%.0f]" <plantbed> (Garden_moist) {mqtt="<[mosquitto:home/json:state:JSONPATH($.data[11])]"}

and look like:

There is nothing stopping you from including data from more than 1 sensor in a JSON and send that all in one MQTT message. This way you could for instance put all the sensor data from say one room, or the entire garden in one MQTT message and send it.
Beware though that the default packet size supported by the PubSub client is 128 bytes. You can increase this limit by editing the value of MQTT_MAX_PACKET_SIZE in PubSubClient.h.
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^*)There is a fork of Nick O’Leary’s PubSub library, by Imroy, that will happily send:
client.publish(topic, String (value));