Control Smarthome Windows PC Mqtt Client

A java mqtt client for a windows pc with addons, runs as a jar written in java with maven.
Upon connecting or disconnecting to the mqtt broker, the client publishes a message to the topic smarthome/mqtt_client/status_update with the payload Online/Offline.

AskMyPc Controller

A smarthome control component that subscribes to the topic smarthome/mqtt_client/askmypc_action.
When the mqtt client recieves a message with this topic, it will hand it over the AskMyPc controller which will match an action to perform from a designated json file and perform the action on the computer.

Requirements

• Java Development Kit (JDK) version 1.7 and above
• Maven Deployment

Deployment

Build the jar file with maven using the following command within the folder containing the pom.xml file:
mvn clean package

This action will create a folder called target with the build project files, we only need three files, you can delete the rest and the downloaded repository after copying the three files to your selected path:

• SmarthomeMqttClient-jar-with-dependencies.jar is the application code.
• SmarthomeMqttClient.bat is the application activation script, edit the file in any text editor and update your broker's data inside the designated quotation marks.
• action_map.json is the mapping file for mapping an action to perform on your computer to a payload recieved to the topic.

Usage

To start the application, just double click the AskMyPc.bat, assuming it's configured properly, it will start the mqtt client and a message will be published with the payload Online to the topic smarthome/mqtt_client/status_update notifying the broker with the client status.
The client then will subscribe to the topic smarthome/askmypc/action and transfer the incoming payloads to the AskMyPc Handler.

Tge AskMyPc Handler will get the message and iterate over the action_map.json looking for an action to perform based on the recieved payload and will try to perform it as a Desktop Application and if it failes, the controller will try to perform the action as a Web Application.

Example of usage

In the action_map.json file:

• The facebook payload is mapped to https://www.facebook.com/.
• The excel payload is mapped to C:/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Root/Office16/EXCEL.EXE
• The word and google is mapped to a json object containing to mappings:
  • C:/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Root/Office16/WINWORD.EXE
  • https://www.google.com

When the AskMyPc Controller recieves the payloads:

• facebook it will open the facebook site as a web application in your default web browser.
• excel it will open microsoft excel as a desktop application.
• word and google it will open the google website as a web application and microsoft word as a desktop application.

When editing the action_map.json file, please check the syntax with JSONLint, a broken syntax will cause the application to crash.

Log Files

All the log files are daily rolled:

• MqttConnectionManager.yyyy-MM-dd.log is the log file for the Mqtt Client.
• AskMyPc.yyyy-MM-dd.log is the log file for AskMyPc Controller.

Special Notes

• Please note, the client does not supports ssl connectivty to the broker, it is meant to run inside the local network.
• Please note, Online payloads will be published with the topic smarthome/mqtt_client/status_update, when the topic smarthome/mqtt_client/request_status_update is recieved, that way you can get the status of the client from other clients.