In performing this activity, you'll subscribe and publish to a topic on the AWS IoT Cloud dashboard, with a formatted JSON message. This message will be delivered to a message queue, and then appear in your Slack team channel.
A message broker is a pub/sub service used to send and receive messages between devices and apps.
Each message is published to a topic, and the message broker then delivers those messages to all of the topic's subscribers. A useful analogy is a Slack channel: Each Slack channel is like a topic, and members can send (publish) messages to other members of the channel (subscribers).
The messaging protocol we will be using is MQTT, specifically version 3.1.1. In more detailed activities, you will use websockets to send and receive MQTT messages, but for now you'll use the AWS IoT dashboard to communicate with the makersPrep topic we've set up.
Sign in page: https://offerzen-make.signin.aws.amazon.com/console Credentials: These have been mailed to you.
After logging in, ensure that you are in the Ohio region. There's a region-select dropdown next to your name in the top right of the page.
Message format: a JSON object with attributes "maker" as your AWS username, "completed_prep" as true, and an optional "message" string containing text of your choice. This will publish an MQTT message to the makersPrep topic.
If you're not sure why your message isn't working, test it with JSON lint
If your message publishes sucessfully and contains the required data, Maker Bot on Slack will post to your team channel! 🤖🌈 If you don't see anything within a few minutes, try again or get in touch on Slack for help.
If you need help, contact @Dan on Make Slack.