Introduction to Raspberry Pi and MQTT

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a trending field for research and development. The future of IoT has the potential to be limitless. By 2025, it is estimated that there will be more than 21 billion IoT devices. So, wouldn’t it be great if you could add these to your known technological stacks? In this book, we will start with the absolute basics.

I will walk you through two fascinating subjects throughout this book: Raspberry Pi, which is a prevalent development board for beginners, and MQTT, a very commonly used and robust communication protocol to delve into the world of IoT.

This chapter will introduce you to the basics of MQTT and Raspberry Pi. Moreover, it will help you set up your Raspberry Pi. Although simple, it is crucial to perform each step as this will help us set up our own local MQTT broker on the Raspberry Pi. This will also help you understand how to get started with your new Raspberry Pi by installing an operating system onto it.

First, we will flash the popular Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS on our Raspberry Pi. After that, we will install all the necessary libraries and packages to make our device a local MQTT broker.

We will cover the following main topics in this chapter:

• What is MQTT and how does it work?
• A gentle introduction to Raspberry Pi
• Setting up your Raspberry Pi

So, let’s start by knowing what MQTT is.