I’ve succesfully setup an Openhab system with three ESP8266 nodes measuring temp and switching lights over MQTT to a Raspberry Pi with Openhab and Mosquitto. Everything works except I’ve had some WAF issues with wifi that I suspect are related to the extra traffic. I have a seperate wifi AP available, is it possible to setup the ESPs and Mosquitto on a seperate wifi network and still be able to talk to the RPi Openhab from the home one ?
How much extra traffic are we talking about? MQTT is really light weight and most messages fit in a single IP packet. So unless your three ESP8266 are flooding your network with thousands of messages per second I find it difficult to believe that is the problem. I’d be surprised if three ESP8266s even have enough power to generate enough network traffic to cause problems on anything over an 802.11g AP.
Yes but setting it up is not trivial. You will need to set up a device on your network to bridge between the two networks and set up this device to route between the two networks. This could mean adding two wifi dongles to the bridge, or having the bridge wired to one and wifi to the other. Research network bridging.
I’ll also point out that assuming your problem is actually interference as opposed to bandwidth, which is FAR more likely, adding another AP will simple exacerbate the problem, not fix it.
I agree that MQTT isn’t likely causing issues. Can you explain more about your issues, what your seeing? One of my esp’s has been connected for 4d2h (since I upgraded access point firmware) and shows 781k down and 2MB up. It reports as often as every 60 seconds. That’s not much for 4 days.
If you just want an additional subnet, you can simply add the other AP to your existing network and broadcast a new ssid but all congestion and broadcast will just flood the other ap through the wired network unless you get routing involved.
If you want to subnet things out, it gets much more complicated with routing and potentially vlans if you don’t want tons of redundant underutilized hardware.
I have my automation network vlan’d off from my other networks for “security” as well as other things but it’s fairly complex and I’m using better gear than the average home owner.
rlkoshak makes excellent points. Do you live in a populated area? I would get netstumbler or something to see how many ssid’s and on what channel and how strong you have floating around your house. I have also seen microwaves absolutely kill certain AP’s.
I used linksys and netgear type stuff for years trying to get a decent network… I gave up and bought ubiquiti. It’s not cisco but it is quality hardware for CHEAP money. My firestick refused to work on wifi and coverage was poor. Plopped a unifi UAP in place and it works flawlessly every time. I was planning on doing zero handoff and adding more ap’s but the one is good enough. Probably going to replace it with the new AC lite to bump the speed.