Zanzito - MQTT Extension

A lightweight bridge between your device and your MQTT/home automation system

Zanzito is an app that acts as a bridge between your Android phone and an MQTT server. MQTT is a lightweight means of communication between systems, such as your home automation system and the various sensors and hardware devices in your home.

The MQTT protocol is based on the principle of publishing messages and subscribing to topics, or "pub/sub". Multiple clients connect to a broker and subscribe to topics of interest. Clients connect to the broker and publish messages to topics.

With Zanzito, your Android phone becomes a fully integrated home automation appliance, but other uses are possible, MQTT being an open and very flexible system.

With Zanzito, you can send to your server/home automation system information from your Android phone:

- Your current location;

- The values of the hardware sensors in your phone (i.e. battery level, ambient temperature, light level and so on);

- Pictures from your phone (manually or at a given interval).

- Any other information you want through MQTT publishing to your own custom topics ("Activities"). For example, you can send a message to switch a light on, or activate your home alarm system.

You can also receive:

- Text messages and notifications;

- Audible alarms;

- SMS text messages to be sent through your phone.

- Any other information (including pictures) through MQTT subscriptions to your own custom topics ("Reports").

Zanzito also supports:

- SSL/TLS connections to the MQTT broker and dual host configuration (public/local addresses) with home WiFi auto-detection.

- Custom voice commands for any publishing topic ("Activity") added by the user and, EXPERIMENTALLY, continuous voice recognition.

- Text to speech functionality (TTS) also via MQTT.

- FIND (www.internalpositioning.com) for room presence detection.

- Auto-discovery of current topics on your MQTT server.

- Admin module to manage remotely all your Zanzito devices.

- Remote administration via MQTT.

If you use Home Assistant (https://home-assistant.io/) you can find a custom notifier component here: https://tinyurl.com/ha-component

* Once downloaded and installed, Zanzito will work in “demo” mode: it will connect to your MQTT server for each first 120 minutes every four hours. After the four hours have passed, you will have to restart the connection manually.

In demo mode you can add only one custom Activity and one custom Report and the Admin module will be restricted to your own current device.

There are two licensing levels available:

- Base. It unlocks all current Zanzito's functionalities except the Admin module; this license is not upgradeable and it is not available to other family members.

- Full. It unlocks all Zanzito's functionalities, forever. This license will be included in your Family library. It requires a licensing app to be installed on your device: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.barbaro.zanzitolicense