Our friend Leon Anavi has been busy with the Internet of Things, and in this case its the ESP8266 connecting to the cloud using MQTT and the open source project ESP8266-jajda. Previously he has covered how to set up MQTT broker in a Linux container, and now he goes through the details of connecting to it.

MQTT is a publish-subscribe machine to machine connectivity protocol. It is suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) as it works properly behind NAT. ESP8266 connects to the local WiFi router and through it to Mosquitto - an open source MQTT broker that Is deployed on the cloud.
 

This is a smart MQTT client for ESP8266 with the following features:

• On the first boot an open WiFi network and HTTP server are launched. The user joins the network and configures the credentials for his home Wifi network. After that ESP8266 restarts and works as MQTT client,
• On each next boot ESP8266 tried to connect to the home WiFi network with the configured credentials and to MQTT broker through the Internet connection,
• The user can reset the configations at any time by holding GPIO0 to low for 5 seconds.

Video

You can find further Information about this project at Leon's page Connecting ESP8266 to Cloud with MQTT.