Bluetooth LE and Node-RED with MQTT

The easiest way to get started with Puck.js and Node-RED is to use the EspruinoHub software on a Raspberry Pi. This provides a bridge between Bluetooth Low Energy and MQTT.

To get this set up, please follow the instructions on the EspruinoHub GitHub page

Getting Started

Once the server is installed, you can access Node-RED via HTTP on port

1. For instance at http://raspberry:1880

To start receiving MQTT packets:

• Drag an mqtt input node and a debug output node onto the page, and connect them together.
• Double-click on the mqtt node, and:
  • Make sure Server says localhost:1883 (you'll need to add a new server the first time you use Node-RED)
  • Make sure Topic says /ble/# - # is a wildcard in MQTT
• Now click Deploy in the top right
• Make sure the button to the right of the debug node is bright green

• Click on 𝍢 in the top right, View, and then Debug messages

You should now see a whole load of advertising messages appearing:

If you modify your Puck's software to use the NRF.setAdvertising function then the new information you are advertising will also appear in the debug messages.

Narrowing it down

Getting all the adverising information isn't very useful, but we can easily narrow it down by changing Topic in the mqtt input.

In my example, there was /ble/advertise/e7:e0:57:ad:36:a2/rssi in the Debug pane. This is the rssi (signal strength) of advertising packets from the Puck with address e7:e0:57:ad:36:a2.

To listen to all messages from e7:e0:57:ad:36:a2 we could use /ble/advertise/e7:e0:57:ad:36:a2/# but as we're just interested in rssi we'll use the full path in topic. Change the address to the address that was reported in your debug window.

If you hit Deploy now you'll see just the rssi value reported.

Graphing the Data

If you followed the instructions for EspruinoHub you should also have the UI library installed.

• Grab a chart element from ui
• Connect it up to the mqtt node
• Double-click on it and give it a name
• Now click Deploy
• You can now go to http://raspberry:1880/ui in your web browser, and you'll see a UI with a graph. The more ui widgets you drag into your Node-RED flow, the more you'll see in the UI frame.

Using the data

Perhaps we want to use the signal strength to make something happen when the Puck is nearer than a certain distance away (so a certain signal strength).

• From the debug messages, figure out a good value for signal strength to use (remember it's negative!).
• Drag a function block on, double-click it and use the following code inside it, where -70 is replaced with your value:

msg.payload = msg.payload > -70;
return msg;

• Now link it inbetween mqtt and debug, You can delete existing links by clicking them and pressing delete.
• Click Deploy - the number will now change to a boolean which will change to true when the Puck is closer than a certain distance.
• The RSSI value can fluctuate, so you might want to draw on a smooth Node to smooth it out:

Doing something

Now you might want to do something with that information. If you have used a Raspberry Pi, you can drag out an rpi gpio block to change the value on a GPIO pin with the value you now have.

Or you might want to send an email with the email block. The problem is that you don't want to send an e-mail several times a second. You only want something to happen when it changes.

For this you need to use the unhelpfully named rbe (Report By Exception) block. This will only let messages through if the value in them has changed.

Detecting Button presses

Since Puck.js has a button, detecting button presses is an obvious thing to want to do. We can't guarantee that every single advertising packet Puck.js sends will be received, so we need an error-tolerant way of detecting a press.

A simple way to do that is to send a number that increments every time the button is pressed. That way, even if some advertising packets are missed, as long as the hub detects that the value has changed it'll know a button has been pressed.

Some code to do this on Puck.js would be:

var pressCount = 0;
setWatch(function() {
  pressCount++;
  NRF.setAdvertising({
    0xFFFF : [pressCount]
  });
}, BTN, { edge:"rising", repeat:true, debounce:50 });

The choice of 0xFFFF for the advertising is completely random.

You can then use the rbe (Report By Exception) block to detect when the received count has changed - for example:

In this case show toast just presents a banner to anyone that is currently viewing the UI page. This method could be used for detecting any kind of event - not just button presses.

Detecting presence

You can also detect when a beacon is available, and when it disappears (that is, there is no advertising message for 1 minute).

Simply subscribe to the /ble/presence/de:vi:ce:ad:dr MQTT topic, and you'll get a 1 when it appears, and a 0 when it disappears.

Controlling the Puck

The next step is to send a message to the Puck when something happens.

This time we'll just add some buttons to trigger events.

• Add two inject buttons
• Double-click on one and set Payload to LED1.set();
• Double-click on the other and set Payload to LED1.reset();
• Now drag in a function node and connect them both to it
• Double-click on it and set the code to:

msg.payload += "\n";
return msg;

This will add a newline to the commands which are to be send (which is needed so Puck.js knows it's the end of a command).

• Finally drag an mqtt output, and set the topic to /ble/write/e7:e0:57:ad:36:a2/nus/nus_tx where the address is the address of your device.

And you're done! Click Deploy and when you click the buttons you'll be able to turn the LED on or off. You can use this functionality to execute functions that you have previously defined on the Puck as well.

Note: The format is /ble/write/de:vi:ce:ad:dr/service/characteristic, so you don't have to write to the Nordic UART on Puck.js. You can define your own services and write directly to those (the format is either 6e400001b5a3f393e0a9e50e24dcca9e for 128 bit uuids or abcd for 16 bit UUIDs).

More!

You can also make Node-RED talk to IFTTT, with the node-red-contrib-ifttt module.

• Log into your Raspberry Pi as the pi user
• Type cd .node-red
• Type npm install node-red-contrib-ifttt
• Restart Node-RED with node-red-stop then node-red-start

Now you'll have an IFTTT block that you can use to trigger IFTTT events!