Smart Home SCADA

2025 · Ignition 8.1 · MQTT / Sparkplug B · Node-RED · ESP32 · SQLite historian

Build a centralized home-automation platform on industrial SCADA principles rather than consumer smart-home tooling, so the house is supervised the way a plant is. Ignition 8.1 Perspective runs the HMI, every room is modeled as a User-Defined Type, and ESP32 nodes reach the historian over MQTT with Node-RED handling the transforms. That gives reliable real-time monitoring and control of 10+ IoT devices at sub-second response latency.

10+
IoT Devices Monitored: <1s
Response Latency: 3
Rooms Instrumented

First look

Perspective dashboard: alarm status, per-room controls, trend chart, energy roll-up and floor plan

What I built

Designed the architecture integrating Ignition 8.1 Perspective with ESP32 sensor nodes.
Bridged sensors to the historian over MQTT, with Node-RED handling transforms.
Modeled each room as a User-Defined Type so tags stayed structured and reusable.
Logged tag history to SQLite and drove trend charts and energy roll-ups from named queries.

What came of it

10+ IoT devices monitored and controlled from a single platform.
Sub-second response latency across the sensor network.

The other plates

Node-RED flow panel: the MQTT Sparkplug node feeding a function node that republishes to esp32/led

Ignition tag browser: the Home tree with alarms, per-room tags and MQTT nodes — Every room is a UDT: statuses, setpoints and alarms in one tree, with the MQTT nodes beside them.

Node-RED debug rail: each message received, LightStatus found, and the ON sent back — Sparkplug B payloads land in Node-RED; the function node reads LightStatus off the tag and republishes to esp32/led, and the debug rail shows the round trip.

Ignition 8.1 · MQTT / Sparkplug B · Node-RED · ESP32 · SQLite historian