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I've had a few requests to add Sparkplug decoding to MQTT Viewer. As someone who has never used Sparkplug and has just done some googling, I'd like to sanity check the following with someone who knows more: What's Sparkplug?A standardised schema for messages with an associated protobuf descriptor and client libraries. How it worksSparkplug B has a single protobuf file: https://github.com/Cirrus-Link/Sparkplug/blob/main/sparkplug_b/sparkplug_b.proto Client libraries exist that encode/decode message data using the protobuf descriptor as an additional layer in front of MQTT. What I can doI can embed all Sparkplug protobuf descriptors into MQTT Viewer, and then allow a user to mark a connection as 'Sparkplug'. Questions
BonusConsidering Sparkplug gives us more metadata than the standard MQTT message, there might be cool and interesting ways to display/organise Sparkplug data beyond the standard tree view. If you have any ideas, I'm all ears! |
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Replies: 3 comments 11 replies
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Sparkplug B is basically two key things over MQTT with a standardised topic structure:
For the state management side, I'd suggest ignoring that bit for now (something to worry about in the future?). By ignoring the state management it means you can sit there as a listener and, assuming that the setup already has the necessary components set up to trigger the data flow, just be a tap onto the data being transferred. That aligns with how I think your software could find a real use and how I plan to use it myself. Not as the actual tool to do the publish and/or subscribe on a normal basis, but as a tool to support other components and see what is going on and if something is wrong. Which leaves looking at the DATA packets and decoding them as what I believe is a more useful function. You might just need to process some of the state information to be able to show the data you get in a reasonable way. I'm not aware of anyone using Sparkplug A. |
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Perfect, this is exactly the info I needed! Unless I'm mistaken, If I decode everything arriving I should be able to show BIRTH and DEATH messages without any extra effort right?
By 'viewer' do you mean anything beyond sending/visualising Sparkplug B data? |
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In theory yes, those messages are just stateful content but they're still encoded with protobuf and can be shown By viewer I mean something more passive in the process. Sparkplug B has a concept of the primary host application, i.e. a specific subscriber, that needs to be online before the corresponding publishers will publish. If that is in place and working then your software can just sit there watching the messages rather than be active in the state process and potentially interfere with the data flow, think of it almost like an old school wire tap on a serial line. |
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Easy, I should be able to show everything.
Super useful, thanks. An old-school wire tap is for sure what I'm going for now with Sparkplug based on this discussion. I've done some data visualisation work in the past and would love to innovate beyond just showing incoming messages in the current tree format if possible. Can I hit you up for your thoughts when I've worked out some potential approaches? |
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Ofc! I'm still learning Sparkplug B myself, and I mostly use it within an application that someone else has done all the hard work on. Does mean if you have a public broker I can easily |
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@adamwoodland2 thanks for the offer. I managed to hook into some public sparkplug messages for testing. v0.6.0 is out and has Sparkplug support. Let me know if it works well! |
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Copy paste my reddit reply here as this is the better place to talk about sparkplug. Regarding addressing my pain points in the other reddit post, no, I don't see this app being any different from the others I have used. |
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You're 100% correct that something seems to be broken with protobuf decoding. I'll ping you when I've had time to fix it and a new version is out. I'm going to rework how Sparkplug decoding works and automate it as much as possible, bearing in mind that you mentioned you have brokers with a mixture of Sparkplug and non-Sparkplug topics. What this should mean for you is that you'll just have to toggle an 'Enable Sparkplug Decoding' option on and I'll automatically decode any messages that match the Sparkplug B descriptor, leaving others as is. From a publishing point of view, I'll add Sparkplug as an encoding option that you can toggle the same way as Base64 and Hex. |
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To add to this, considering Sparkplug topics all start with a version identifier |
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@thebaldgeek , v0.6.0 now has Sparkplug support. Keen to hear your thoughts. |
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Using Beta 0.6.0 Sparkplug decoding does not seem to be working... .or at least the only place I can see it optioned is a switch on the connection page, when turned on, Im still seeing probuf encoded data from the broker. |
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No, this should just work once switched on. Which Sparkplug version are you using? Could you create an issue with some more info? |
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Sparkplug support with automatic decoding / encoding has been added in v0.6.0 |
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Sparkplug support with automatic decoding / encoding has been added in v0.6.0