LibreServer Blog / Freedombone and IoT

Recently support for MQTT notifications has been added, so within your local network it's now possible to have IoT devices which support MQTT subscriptions listen for admin notifications coming from the server and then do something with that.

I've added an Arduino code example for an ESP8266 board (WeMos D1) using MQTT over wifi to listen for backup status messages from the Freedombone server. It then controls two LEDs which can be used to indicate whether the backup has succeeded or failed.

Note that the admin notifications aren't especially security sensitive. They only contain generic messages such as "Disk space low" or "USB device detected". So even if there are rogue IoT devices on your local network they can't glean anything very sophisticated from the messages.

There are many fun things which can be done with IoT at not much cost. Buzzers. Solenoids. Wearables. If you have a smartwatch which supports MQTT then you could also receive the notifications that way, although it would only work within your local wifi network.