Binary sensor not being updated from MQTT

Configuration
1

I am trying to setup a boolean sensor to track the state of a google calendar event. In my configuration.yaml I have defined the following binary sensor:

mqtt:                                                                              
  binary_sensor:                                            
    name: "PelletStoveCalendar"                                
    state_topic: "/home/Living Room/PelletStoveCalendar"

If I go to the MQTT integration and subscribe to the topic “/home/Living Room/PelletStoveCalendar” I can see the value change between “on” and “off” as I expect it to:

Message 1 received on /home/Living Room/PelletStoveCalendar at 10:29 AM:

off

QoS: 0 - Retain: false
Message 0 received on /home/Living Room/PelletStoveCalendar at 10:29 AM:

on

QoS: 0 - Retain: true

In the developer tools states table the value is always unknown:


PelletStoveCalendar               unknown 	friendly_name: PelletStoveCalendar

I have other mqtt sensors that are not binary that are working correctly so I am not sure why this one is not,.

I am running HA 2022.11.1 in a Docker container.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

2 
mqtt:                                                                              
  binary_sensor:                                            
    name: "PelletStoveCalendar"                                
    state_topic: "/home/Living Room/PelletStoveCalendar"
    value_template: "{{ value | upper }}"

By default, MQTT Binary Sensor expects to receive uppercase ON and OFF.

Screenshot_20230120-134928~2
Screenshot_20230120-134928~21129×353 44.1 KB

3

Thank you for the help. I changed the code that publishes the MQTT message to be upper case and it is working now. I originally had payload_off: off and payload_on: on but that did not seem to work, using uppercase did the trick.

1 Like
4

You’re welcome!

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