After successful implementation of MQTT into Lamp Relay with ESP8266 there was one remaining challenge. Communication of Android Lamp App with ESP8266 via MQTT. It was little bit harder than I expected, because examples were not very clear.

Sending commands to MQTT broker was relatively easy. There was just a catch. It is necessary to declare the MQTT service in AndroidManifest.xml:

<service android:name="org.eclipse.paho.android.service.MqttService">
</service>

Thanks to tutorial from HiveMQ I was able to send messages to MQTT broker.

The problem was the opposite direction. How to receive messages?

Well, there is support in the same MQTT library for topic subscriptions. The issue is that incoming message is being processed on background thread and it’s not possible to update UI. It took me some time to realize the source of problem. I was hunting ghosts. I thought that there is some problem in ImageButton or TobbleButton.

Correct solution was to move communication to Android service class. Then bind the service so UI can send commands to the service and the last part was to add broadcast receiver to pass message from service to UI.

Here is small schema which describes delivery of message from broker to app.

It was necessary to make also small update in ESP8266 in order to tell Mosquitto to persist the state of a lamp (the last bool parameter):

mqttClient.publish(topicName("relay"), "off", true);

The result is nice. I can turn on the lamp via web interface and all connected Android apps are updated and user can see the state of the lamp.

The code for Android app is available at Github – LampApp. Previous code with REST API was moved to branch v0.1. The code for ESP8266 module is also at Github – LampESP. Feel free to customize the app. You can find instructions in README.md.

I see the next challenge for LampApp: display lamp control widget at lock screen. Maybe I’ll be more successful than the last time.