Getting started 2

General
1

I am new to this and i am having a real time trying to make everything work. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

Hello @ss1012 and welcome to the Forum.

You haven't provided any information, so really difficult to offer help/guidance at this stage.
If you can share more information about your "set-up" and what you are trying to do - I'm sure people will be pleased to help you.

3

Hi David,

I am starting from scratch. What I am trying to do is connect to a Click PLC to retrieve production data. When I do the MQTT setup on the click PLC, I can’t get a connection to it. I am using Mosquitto to try and make this connection. When I do a test topic _pub and _sub on 2 different cmd windows I can see the test message. That is where I am at this point.

4
  1. What device do you run Node-red on?
  2. What device is your Mosquitto broker on?
  3. What status do mqtt nodes show in the Node-red editor?
  4. Have you configured Mosquitto to allow connections from other computers? (by default it will only allow connections from localhost)
5

MQTT Explorer is a great FREE tool for debugging MQTT issues.

Might be an idea to try it out before moving on to Node-RED.

6

I am trying to run Node red from my PC. Mosquitto is on the same PC. I do not have Node Red editor installed yet. Mosquitto.conf file has been changed to (allow_anonymous true)

7

If you have installed Node-RED using the Official Documentation, the Editor is in the Application. See here.

A good place to start is with these videos - they will save your time.

8

allow_anonymous true is, I believe, not sufficient to allow connections from other devices.
You probably also need to specify a port to listen on.

9

Sorry 1883 was the port.

10

Is that a Windows PC? If so, not only does mosquitto's default configuration need changing to allow connections from somewhere other than "localhost" (AKA "127.0.0.1"), Windows Firewall will probably also need changing to allow traffic to come into the PC on the appropriate port (normally port # 1883).

11

Finally got the Node-RED working, however I still can’t connect to my plc. I got IT involved checking to see what is blocking it. I think it is a firewall issue.

12

IMHO both Mosquitto and Node-red are simpler to run on a small Linux server such as a Raspberry Pi.

You can access the NR editor and any dashboards via a browser on your PC