Bridger is a Meshtastic MQTT to InfluxDB metrics bridge. It listens to MQTT for protobuf messages and uses those to push metrics to InfluxDB.

Usage

You will need InfluxDB and a MQTT broker running or available already.

Copy the the .env.default file to .env and view for the environment variables that can be set. The following are required:

• MQTT_TOPIC
• MQTT_BROKER
• MQTT_USER
• MQTT_PASS
• INFLUXDB_V2_BUCKET
• INFLUXDB_V2_ORG
• INFLUXDB_V2_TOKEN
• INFLUXDB_V2_URL

There are some other tunables as well:

• INFLUXDB_V2_WRITE_PRECISION
• MESHTASTIC_API_CACHE_TTL: The time to cache the Meshtastic API data. Defaults to 6 hours.
• MESHTASTIC_KEY: The base64 encoded encryption key for the primary channel. Defaults to the the key provided by AQ==
• MQTT_TEST_CHANNEL
• MQTT_TEST_CHANNEL_ID
• DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN
• DISCORD_BOT_OWNER_ID
• BRIDGER_ADMIN_ROLE
• EMQX_API_KEY
• EMQX_SECRET_KEY
• EMQX_URL
• LOG_PATH: Set this to a file path to log to a file. Defaults to logs/bridger.log

Then install the required packages in a Python virtual environment:

pip install -r requirements.txt

And run the script:

python -m bridger

Node Setup

To get your Meshtastic node to send metrics to the MQTT broker you will need to set the following settings:

MQTT Module:

• Enabled: Checked
• MQTT Server Address: mqtt.austinmesh.org
• MQTT Username: <created_per_user>
• MQTT Password: <created_per_user>
• Encryption Enabled: Unchecked
• JSON Enabled: Unchecked
• TLS Enabled: Unchecked
• Root topic: egr/home

Primary Channel:

• Uplink Enabled: Checked

Podman / Docker

You can run Bridger in a container setup using Docker or Podman Compose. You'll need to set up the .env file as above first. You can start by copuing the .env.default file to .env and editing it.

Initial Bootstrap

Start by building the images required:

podman compose build

Then create the InfluxDB and EMQX keys that need to go in the .env file. You can do this by running the following command:

podman compose run --rm -v emqx-config:/opt/emqx/etc bridger python3 -m bridger.cli generate-apikey

Replace the keys it outputs in the .env file. These get written to the EMQX config volume so you only need to do this once.

Now you need to create a user for Bridger in EMQX. You can do this by running the following command (replacing your node ID and Discord ID):

podman compose run --rm bridger python3 -m bridger.cli create-user 934ccc74 206914075391688704

EMQX

The default EMQX username and password is admin / public. You will be forced to change this at first login. But you'll already have an API key for Bridger created form the previous steps.

InfluxDB

You'll need to bootstrap some of InfluxDB. Navigate to http://localhost:8086 and create a user, organization and bucket. The names of these need to match what you put in the .env file.

Run

You can start the containers using:

podman compose up -d

URLs

• EMQX Dashboard: http://localhost:18083
• InfluxDB Dashboard: http://localhost:8086
• Grafana Dashboard: http://localhost:3000