Clipsal C-Gate to MQTT with Autodiscovery

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1

For the past few years i’ve been faithfully using @the1laz 's MQTT gateway for CBus lighting actions, however I always wished it had a little more functionality and wished for mqtt auto-discovery to make it easier to keep Home Assistant and C-Bus in sync.

Over the past school holidays I found some hours to upgrade the project substantially around looking after my kids.

New functionality:

  • Support for Lights, Covers, Relays and PIRs
  • Support for username/password security for cgate
  • Improved logging, retries and backoffs
  • MQTT AutoDiscovery and publishing of devices for HAAS
  • New linux service installer script
  • Unit testing (83% coverage) + GitHub actions CI.

Would love any feedback and requested additions. Shout out to @the1laz for the original work all those years ago.

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THAT is an extensive upgrade! Well done and its been on your mind since 2021 I can see. Good luck, the more test sites the better but the changes bring some good features.

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3

Thanks! I’m considering what to work on next, and wondered if anyone is using SSL support with their CGate? Would love to build it out if anyone wants to test with me?

4

This is cool! I never got around to improving the code once I got it working because it did the job well enough, good to see someone else has done it. I no longer have Cbus at home so I don’t maintain the code at all, I hope you don’t mind but I’ve linked your repo in my readme, hopefully people using home assistant give yours a go.

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Hi Doug,

I’ve bitten the bullet and packaged your project into a working Docker image to test if there are any improvements over the older builds. Previously I was running C-Gate/OpenHAB on a Pi, and over the past 12 months I’ve been transitioning to Home Assistant.

One issue I’ve run into (which may also affect older versions) is that several of my group addresses — specifically 201/202/203, used for Home/Away/Night modes — are showing as unknown in Home Assistant after a restart, until the next state change occurs.

I’ve confirmed that retainreads = true is set in settings.js, but MQTT messages published from C-Gate responses (via getall or live events) do not appear to be retained (retain: false in MQTT Explorer and HA listener). As a result, Home Assistant can’t recover their state after a restart unless something actively triggers them again.

I’m happy to help test any fix or PR for this — really appreciate the work you’ve done on this project.

Cheers,
David.