MQTT Puns

There seems to be a lot of information around how to use MQTT with HA, but I am struggling to find something that explains why or when I should use MQTT versus other/native integrations.

For example, I set up my first Shelly device today, and it was very easy to use the native integration. However, all the how-to guides I read use MQTT, but don’t describe why that’s desirable.

Can anyone help me connect the dots? Is the tendency for MQTT just legacy from a time when native integrations weren’t as plentiful, or good?

Edit: Thank you all for the comprehensive and very helpful comments! I have a much better understanding of the intent and use cases. What a great community.

I've dabbled a bit with MQTT, and I mostly understand how you're supposed to subscribe to events that you want to listen for, but is there any function or API call where I can ask the MQTT broker: "What is the current value of X"?

I have some automations where I'd like to mess with some configuration parameters of zwave devices for a few minutes, and then restore it back to its original value.

I know how to change the parameters through MQTT or zwave_js, but I don't easily see how I can get the current value of a parameter, so I can restore it later.

If I pull up MQTT Explorer I can see all the values that I want to retrieve, but in a nodered flow, ideally I want to do something that says "give me the current values of /topic/foo/whatever/3/2/7", and it will return a json object, similar to what I can see in the explorer.

But I don't see anything that would allow me to do that?

Ideally I don't want to have to subscribe to that topic and maintain my own separate registry of the values in parallel for all time, I just want to be able to retrieve a value when I need it.

Am I misunderstanding MQTT and this is just something that's not done? Or am I missing some obvious service call that can give me that data?

This project provides a self hostable service that connects to a MQTT broker and serves a progressive web app panel which is fully configurable via YAML. Ideal as a "I'm not ready to commit to full blown HA yet" solution. Super easy to get up and running.

See docs for a quick containerised demo:

https://github.com/sourcesimian/mqtt-panel/blob/main/README.md

I have a system built on MQTT clients running on ESP32 for inputs and outputs, for sensors and motors / output devices.

I then have a Dashboard, that shows some gauges and statuses. Node Red and Mosquitto are running on Raspberry Pi.

Is there a way to confirm the node is connected and show this on the dashboard? I could monitor each node's messages to see if there's been activity in the last 5 minutes, and show red if not? Or I could make a 'heartbeat' topic that all nodes are subscribed to, and then have them all reply separately? reset the indicators when the heartbeat is send and turn it green again when they reply?Is there a simpler way to do this?The MQTT status doesn't really work as the local server is still running, but the data isn't being updated from the client.

Edit: I guess I could use a Trigger for this? If I'm expecting data every 2 minutes, I could use a trigger on the MQTT input, set to say 5 minutes, and if 5 minutes pass without any input it could action something?

Honestly, I'm not sure if this is a Klipper, Fluidd, or maybe even Moonraker question.

I have a power switch, controlled by MQTT. When the MCU is powered on, I can run the gcode macro to power off the switch. However, I get an error that the MCU cannot be reached when trying to run the power-on macro.

19:35:33  $ printer_on
19:35:33  // Lost communication with MCU 'mcu'
// Once the underlying issue is corrected, use the
// "FIRMWARE_RESTART" command to reset the firmware, reload the
// config, and restart the host software.
// Printer is shutdown
19:35:33  !! Lost communication with MCU 'mcu'

Here's my "on" macro:

[gcode_macro PRINTER_ON]
gcode:
    {action_call_remote_method("publish_mqtt_topic",
        topic="ender5pro",
        payload="on",
        qos=0,
        retain=False,
        use_prefix=False)}

(The off macro is the same except the payload is off instead)

What can I do to be able to run that macro when the MCU is powered off?

Half a year ago i started with mysensors (ethernet gateway), conbee2 (deconz) and vzlogger (web interface w/ HA command sensors (curl)).

All the integrations in HA had been the "custom" ones, not the mqtt based integrations.

The conbee 2 had another router in the network which already was a (koenkk-firmware) CC2652RB.

Two days ago i switched to mqtt with ALL services:

• mysgw compiled w/ mqtt support.
• switch from conbee2/deconz to CC2652P (koenkk) and zigbee2mqtt
• switched volkszaehler power metering from web_interface to mqtt client.

And what should i say? I love it.

It feels like the chains have been removed from the system. Yes, i had to put some effort in. To rebind the devices, to put together a script to get a zigbee network map and add some custom sensors because the mysensors_mqtt integration was a little picky with it.

But whenever there is a problem, you can always define a custom mqtt sensors or actor to work around the problem.

Even energy monitoring w/ the energy tab now works like a charm.

This is also a big thanks to all the people working on all the projects i mentioned. So if you have to chose a certain way: always go for the MQTT way.

Hi, I want to ask if you know any actively developed clients for windows on MQTT. I have found about 10 tools but they all seem to have frozen development and half of them are buggy and leave open connections and keep opening more and so on. Thank you for the reply.

I saw other posts about clicking on the preview picture (snapshot?) causing this but I've restarted the service several times and it still happening.

My settings

Only way I can stop it is stopping ring-mqtt.

Z-Wave JS to MQTT

Hi all. I'm working on setting up my Aeotec Z-Wave stick. I've followed these instructions from Aeotec. I got the USB and the keys added, but after I restart the add-on, I received a couple errors noted below.

I've ensured USB is passing through the VM. I've restarted the VM. Looks like the driver isn't installed or it's not starting, but I'm not sure how to verify. Any ideas?

Driver: Failed to initialize the driver: ZWaveError: Timeout while waiting for an ACK from the controller (ZW0200) at Driver.sendMessage (/opt/node_modules/zwave-js/src/lib/driver/Driver.ts:3390:23) at ZWaveController.identify (/opt/node_modules/zwave-js/src/lib/controller/Controller.ts:677:33) at Driver.initializeControllerAndNodes (/opt/node_modules/zwave-js/src/lib/driver/Driver.ts:978:26) at Immediate.<anonymous> (/opt/node_modules/zwave-js/src/lib/driver/Driver.ts:858:16) (ZW0100)

Hi. I asked this question a few days back but only got suggestions from various forums to try different plugins. I want to persevere with this as it was working flawlessly with this exact setup. I’m desperate to understand why this setup isn’t working now. All devices show as ‘no response’ in home app. Can you assist?

Homebridge config:

https://imgur.com/a/DUS9njn

Flashed Tasmota device config:

https://imgur.com/a/w0OQAbe

Output from console on Tasmota device:

https://imgur.com/a/HsC5y3g

Message in logs on Homebridge:

‘This plugin generated a warning from the characteristic ‘Status Active’: characteristic value expected is Boolean and received undefined.’ Also it’s telling me the device is ‘offline’ and ‘Activity set: undefined’. It’s fully controllable from the Tasmota device URL itself so I know it works.

Sure it’s obvious to someone what is going wrong here. I have literally re-imported the Homebridge config settings which worked fine in to this newly setup Homebridge. MQTT reports as working (to my limited knowledge).

Help!!

Hi everyone,

I hope you can help me understand what’s wrong with my config.

I set up blue iris to notify my home assistant setup by MQTT messages when there is movement by creating movement sensors in HA (as seen on “the hookup” video).

Everything has been working flawlessly for about 8 or so months but a few weeks ago I noticed that the sensors get “stuck” detecting motion when there isn’t. It seems like the MQTT server isn’t receiving the “off”/reset message and stays on for hours. It only goes back to stop detecting motion when there is movement again and eventually receives the reset messages on HA.

I think the problem might be with the mqtt messages or resetting the trigger because the HD recording doesn’t keep recording when the movement stops.

I’ve reviewed all my settings with no luck on finding the problem.

Does anyone had this problem or can help me understand what’s going on?

Thank you

Hello,

It seems the mqtt option of zwavejs2mqtt may not live a long life source

Does anyone have experience in migrating mqtt to websocket?

I would imagine the following steps should be executed:

• get list of current mqtt devices
• disable mqtt bridge in zwavejs2mqtt
• cleanup zwavejs2mqtt devices in mosquitto (I use mqtt for other stuff as well)
• cleanup zwavejs2mqtt devices in HA
• enable WS server & disable mqtt discovery
• install zwavejs integration
• validate

Thanks in advance.

edit: typo

I have a flow that publishes MQTT topics. When I first create and deploy, everything works fine. The subscribers see the payloads. However, the connection gets lost eventually. Sometimes randomly (after several days) but also if I reboot the PI host. The only way to get things working again is to go into a MQTT node, select the broker, and redeploy. The MQTT nodes show that they are connected but when I inject topic/payload, nothing happens. I am at a loss to understand what's going wrong.

Looking for a battery sensor that can detect up to 24 volt (or I can reduce it down if need be) and then alert using home assistant/MQTT.

I want to add 2 sensors, one for my door bell sounder and one for me home security alarm. When they ring I want to be able to send a notification. Are there any sensors available that can deleted current flowing and alert me?

Hi Everyone,
I have a problem with MQTT in my ESP project.
I have a Wemos D1 mini with sensors, and I publish the sensor values to an online broker HiveMQ. This is working great. But I would like to use a dashboard to monitor the values in an Android tablet. And there comes the problem.
The MQTT dashboard apps works great on my phones with Android 9 and Android 11. But not working on Android 4.2 and 5.0 tablets. They can't connect to the broker at all.
I assume there is somethin in the old Android versions, but I can't figure it what. My first though was the TLS version, but all of them are TLS 1.2 or above.
Anyone familiar with this problem or maybe have a solution for it?

When I migrated from the original Z-Wave integration, I decided to use the new "Z-Wave JS to MQTT" add-on. I followed a guide (can't find it now) that said I need to set up the "Z-Wave JS" add-on first, before installing the "Z-Wave JS to MQTT" addon and stopping/disabling the "Z-Wave JS" add-on.

The problem is that even though I have "start on boot" and Watchdog disabled, the "Z-Wave JS" add-on occasionally turns itself on, which causes an issue/conflict with the "Z-Wave JS to MQTT" add-on and my Z-Wave devices all become unavailable.

Do I still need the "Z-Wave JS" add-on installed? Did I ever really need it?

Hello r/homelab, I have made a useful script that allows you to publish power draw statistics of multiple iDrac enabled servers to an MQTT broker for use in things like HomeAssistant or power monitoring systems.

It can be downloaded here:

https://github.com/lucaszanchetta/iDracPowerMonitorMQTT

Hi, guys!
Hoping to not violate this subreddit rules posting this project I've been working on in these days.

https://github.com/cmargiotta/mqtt-system-monitor

MQTT system monitor is a fully FOSS project that keeps monitoring PC sensors and publishing their data on an MQTT broker. It natively supports publishing a config message for registration on Home Assistant.

Home Assistant with a configured system monitor\

One of the features that I was searching in other similar projects is the full modularity: sensors are simply small Lua scripts, nothing more. Every user can add a sensor without interacting with the core code and without recompiling the project.

Hello

I followed the procedure to switch to dashboard-v3 , and now I have the options for inbound and outbound MQtt, but, I have not options to set the credentials of my mosquitto mqtt server. What is the way ??

https://hub.shinobi.video/articles/view/LXw2fdkTPIU8BlP

In my company we have a LoRa-sensor network with well over 10k nodes that are sending data packets of around 1kb every 15 minutes. These packets are sent to an AWS MQTT instance. Then the packets are fetched by our backend servers. Then the packets are unpacked and each of them contains around 30 data points that are also sent to the AWS instance and are fetched by another backend service. Basically it's a Microservices Architecture with MQTT as kind of a service bus.

Right now we pay a fair amount of money to Amazon for the MQTT traffic. We use Amazon because we don't want to handle a scalable infrastructure by ourselves.

Couldn't IOTA be used for that use case? As there are no transaction fees it would save us quite a buck. We would run a few IOTA nodes of course.

Is this intended use of the IOTA network? On the other hand: 1000 tps for the whole network seems bit low for such uses... Do I miss something?

There is a really nice use-case I have thought of where I can have an ESP32 device publish e.g., temperature, light intensity, or any arbitory type of sensor value into an IPFS MQTT topic using an ESP32.

I believe an ESP32 is the right device for this because we do not want to run a temperature sensor off an Rpi or a full blown X86 or an ARM PC due to obvious power requirements. ESP32s can be in deep sleep for hours and wake up, publish new values to the topic and go back to sleep. This is a very efficient way of doing things and is not possible with the existing web2 without using a middle server. So, I believe this is clearly a place ipfs shines.

Does anyone know a library I can use to publish into an MQTT IPFS topic using the ESP32?

Hello all,

I'm having a bit of difficulty either understanding how "RTL_433" operates or something is wrong with my setup... (guessing the latter).

Setup:

Banana Pi Pro Dual Core w/ Nooelec NESDR Mini USB RTL2832U

3x Acurite 06044M Temperature/Humidity Sensors

Initially, I had setup the Banana Pi Pro with the Nooelec RTL-SDR and got it working. I setup one of the Acurite sensors and confirmed I was able to see the data come through. I then configured RTL_433 to run as a service and ship the sensor data to MQTT into Home Assistant. I thought all was fine, but I didn't setup all 3 Acurite sensors at once.

I then moved the Banana Pi Pro, RTL_SDR antenna, and 2 of the Acurite sensors into my Gecko Vivarium.

Problem:

When I run RTL_433, I see that only the most recently online device is being picked up by the software or radio. I have confirmed this with running RTL_433 as a service AND when I just run rtl_433 in the command line with no options.

Why is it doing this? Is my Banana Pi the issue here? Is the antenna the issue? Did I not configure RTL_433 properly?

Example output being received by RTL_433 as a service:

Dec 15 10:16:11 prd-mon01 rtl_433[4716]: {"time" : "2021-12-15 15:16:11", "model" : "Acurite-Tower", "id" : 9026, "channel" : "A", "battery_ok" : 1, "temperature_C" : 26.500, "humidity" : 24, "mic" : "CHECKSUM"}

Dec 15 10:16:28 prd-mon01 rtl_433[4716]: {"time" : "2021-12-15 15:16:27", "model" : "Acurite-Tower", "id" : 9026, "channel" : "A", "battery_ok" : 1, "temperature_C" : 26.500, "humidity" : 24, "mic" : "CHECKSUM"}

Dec 15 10:16:28 prd-mon01 rtl_433[4716]: {"time" : "2021-12-15 15:16:27", "model" : "Acurite-Tower", "id" : 9026, "channel" : "A", "battery_ok" : 1, "temperature_C" : 26.500, "humidity" : 24, "mic" : "CHECKSUM"}

Dec 15 10:16:28 prd-mon01 rtl_433[4716]: {"time" : "2021-12-15 15:16:27", "model" : "Acurite-Tower", "id" : 9026, "channel" : "A", "battery_ok" : 1, "temperature_C" : 26.500, "humidity" : 24, "mic" : "CHECKSUM"}

Dec 15 10:16:45 prd-mon01 rtl_433[4716]: {"time" : "2021-12-15 15:16:44", "model" : "Acurite-Tower", "id" : 9026, "channel" : "A", "battery_ok" : 1, "temperature_C" : 26.500, "humidity" : 24, "mic" : "CHECKSUM"}

`Dec 15 10:16:45 prd-mon01 rtl_433[4716]: {"time" : "2021-12-15 15:16:44", "model" : "Acurite-Tower", "id" : 9026, "channel" : "A", "battery_ok" : 1, "temperature_C" : 26.500, "humidity" : 2

I have open sourced "mqtt-gpio" which connects Raspberry Pi GPIO pins to MQTT topics. It supports input and output pins; group of pins; and complex inching. Configurable with YAML.

I run it in K3s on Raspberry Pi OS. The service is built on gpiozero so should work on other devices. It is a very helpful building block in my DIY home automation system. It's a general purpose connector so it can be configured for many different uses. At present I use it to:

• drive relays [e.g.] for my irrigation solenoids and ball valve manipulators [e.g.],
• detect open/closed state of doors/windows using a LTV-816S photocoupler,
• and remotely press various buttons.

I hope that "mqtt-gpio" can help others have more fun and capability in their MQTT infrastructure.

Prebuilt container images on Docker Hub. Docs on GitHub: README.md.

https://preview.redd.it/yep70utysn681.png?width=846&format=png&auto=webp&s=d78a51a094d45e994afb271375dc15e94516196b

I have figured out how to write new firmware for WB2S/BK7231T and I wrote down my experience in a step-by-step tutorial with code samples. Tutorial covers topic like:
- workspace and SDK setup
- firmware burning (by UART)
- blink LED example
- timer example
- UART output example
- UDP server demo
- TCP server demo
- HTTP server demo
- MQTT client demo with Home Assistant compatibility

It was a very hard task, because there is almost no documentation at all and everything involved lots of guessing and testing, but here it is:
https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic3850712.html

So far, it's in Polish only but I will prepare an English translation soon.

Futhermore, I had to fix the MQTT library because it was missing authorization feature. It was not possible to log in to MQTT server. Updated codebase is also on the forum linked above.

WB2S is very popular among smart devices these days and people used to replace it with ESP12F up to this day - but I am going to stop this trend. I am going to create open source firmware for WB2S which will be easily-programmable through UART (just like with ESP) and support multiple modules.

I have also made something similiar for XR809/XR3, here (English version):

https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic3806769.html#19447386

Right now I am starting to work on Tasmota-like open source universal firmware for WB2S. The unofficial name for the projest is OpenWB2S. I am also going to do something similiar for XR809 and maybe for other WB chips, like WB3S, etc.

I will be setting up a github repo soon.

If you like my work, you can support me by doing a Paypal donation - it will cover cost of more smart devices that I'll use for testing:

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/openshwprojects

If your are more into programming and tinkering, you could also help with testing. Do you have any WB2S devices? Do you know where to find WB2S chips? Write a comment or PM, any support is welcome!

PS: You are also welcome to register on Elektroda - I will reply faster there.

I have an old version running steadily on a RPi and it’s been going for a few years.

Mainly MQTT stuff. Lights turning on and off via a bunch of Sonoffs.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the upgrade. Ideal would prob be to upgrade in place and fix what breaks in the process. But I’m under the impression that’s not possible from such an old version.

How would you upgrade your ancient node-red to current?

I'm trying to use mqtt for a project I'm working on which involves generating and sending a csv file from a nodemcu esp32. For that I'm trying to understand mqtt and so far I'm good with the theory but i just can't figure out the codes and tutorials. Like i tried to understand the examples for pubsubclient and I'm lost especially on the void callback function. What should i do?

This project provides a self hostable service that connects to a MQTT broker and serves a progressive web app panel which is fully configurable via YAML. It aims to be a simple panel that gives user interactivity with MQTT topics. Suitable for standalone or MQTT microservice deployments, and can be deployed alongside home automation solutions. It does not offer higher level capabilities such as automations, integrations or scheduling.

Ideal as a "I'm not ready to commit to full blown HA yet" solution. Super easy to get up and running. Great for learning and using MQTT.

See docs for a quick containerised demo: README.md

https://preview.redd.it/22riixtysh781.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa90852a5a08924e5c720b8f5ec3023396ca15ce