Actually forget mqtt. This is clearly meant for developers who already know what they're doing, and there is zero practical help for newbies like me.
So I'm sticking with TCPIP, which is well established and better documented. So now my challenge is reduced to streaming creating a TCP client object in C to stream data to node-red. I guess this is all I'd like to do at this point: to create a "hello world" program in C that streams "hello world" to node-red. That's all. Any practical examples that newbies could follow for this?
Please don't just suggest I google things, because trust I've googled things, and please don't just point me to Github because there is zero practical info on how to actually use what's on Github.