Open Control Architecture

The Open Controls described on this site works as follows:

• Communications between systems is performed using MQTT using a standardised 5 level topic structure. network / node / device / group / key.
• A device managing communications is called a node.
• Data from within a node or from connected devices is assigned a local network identifier of "local" so that the node can separate internal traffic and readings from general traffic. This is stored under global.localNetworkId
• The external network identifier is stored under global.networkId
• The node identifier is stored under global.node
• Attributes for data may be loaded from a central index (GitHub hosted), providing additional information such as units and descriptions. This is to avoid the need to locally describe data, and to assist in compatibility.
• Controls software is written in Node-RED.
• Within Node-RED, data and attributes are stored within the global.readings object.
• Data within the readings object is nested according to the topic (excluding the node as more than one node may publish data on a device).

e.g. a message with a topic myNetwork/node123/myDevice/dat/outputTemperature  would be stored in (global.)readings.myNetwork.myDevice.dat.outputTemperature.value