nRF Cloud and the nRF 9160

[JackW]

Is there a way to send custom MQTT messages from the Nordic Cloud to an nRF9160 running the Asset Tracker 2 firmware?

[Øyvind]

Hello, 

Is there a way to send custom MQTT messages from the Nordic Cloud to an nRF9160 running the Asset Tracker 2 firmware?

No, unfortunately, the nRF Cloud solution does not support custom MQTT messages. From the nRF Cloud documentation on MQTT API

MQTT is a lightweight publish-subscribe protocol for exchanging messages. nRF Cloud is built on AWS and uses the MQTT broker in AWS IoT Core to process MQTT messages sent and received over MQTT topics.

The publish-subscribe process over MQTT is as follows:

1. A device, or the MQTT client running in the modem, connects to the nRF Cloud MQTT endpoint.

2. The device publishes a JSON message on a topic.

3. The MQTT broker receives the message. If a rule is specified, the rule is run, and if the rule's criteria are met, it triggers an action. Typical actions might include storing a message in a database or republishing a subset of the data to another topic.

See more information on the nRF Cloud API overview. 

It is also possible to use nRF Cloud as a cloud-to-cloud solution, where you can use your cloud solution to communicate with nRF Cloud using the REST API.

Let me know if anything is unclear. 

Kind regards,
Øyvind