I am a beginner to MQTT and IoT, but I am experimenting with a project to see if MQTT is a possible solution. We have some scanners and other peripheral devices on a factory floor. We use AWS, so I’m looking into using AWS IoT Greengrass to orchestrate communication from these devices. I understand that I can set up an MQTT core device as an EC2 instance and have full control of that.
However, I’m not sure if I can really access the operating system of the devices. For some of them, I think I may have an option to turn on “MQTT forwarding” through a Windows tool, and I can set an MQTT topic, but this hardly seems enough to set up this device as a client device. From my understanding, when setting up a client device for IoT Greengrass, I’d need to actually access the OS and install IoT SDKs + programs + certificates onto the device itself.
My question is this: is it a definitive prerequisite that I’ll need access to a device’s OS in order to set it up as an IoT client device? If I don’t have access to the OS, is that a deal breaker?
Even if MQTT is “enabled” on a device, doesn’t the device need a Python/Java/Lambda running on the device in order to control the MQTT payload? The MQTT payload can’t be static. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I tried going through AWS IoT tutorials but the client device is either virtual, which I can access, or the client device is a Raspberry Pi. These make sense as I can directly access it, but my device IRL is a barcode scanner. Seems like a basic prereq but i can’t find a definitive answer in IoT docs.
Thanks!