Custom MQTT Sensors not showing as entities

Configuration
1

Hello everyone.
I have been strugling for hour with setting some custom sensors which I want to use for analytics. I have made a ESP32 sketch where I publish some data (as strings) on a few topics. I see that I can read those topics with my phone and also inside HA by subscribing, but I can’t find the entities for those sensors after modifying the YAML.

Here is my configuration

# Loads default set of integrations. Do not remove.
default_config:

# Load frontend themes from the themes folder
frontend:
  themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes

automation: !include automations.yaml
script: !include scripts.yaml
scene: !include scenes.yaml
# sensor: !include_dir_merge_list sensor
mqtt: !include_dir_merge_named mqtt

And the included file mqtt/sensors.yaml:

sensor:
    - name: "Solar Batery Stored Energy"
      unique_id: "solar_batery_stored_energy"
      state_topic: "solar/bat_stored_energy"
      unit_of_measurement: "%"
      
    - name: "Solar Batery Temperature"
      unique_id: "solar_batery_temperature"
      state_topic: "solar/bat_temperature"
      unit_of_measurement: "°C"
      device_class: "temperature"
      
    - name: "Solar Photovoltaic Power"
      unique_id: "solar_photovoltaic_power"
      state_topic: "solar/pv_power"
      unit_of_measurement: "W"
      device_class: "power"

After setting this nothing appears as entity. Restarted a low of time and nothing, no errors in the log either. Incidentally, I can produce errors in the log by, for example, setting device_class as “powerasd” and it will trhow errors or warnings, meaning that it’s actually reading and parsing the files. Yet, nothing to be seen on the developers>states tab

Any hint on what’s missing? I never expected this to be complicated, but I have read a lot of post about this topic, with no avail.

Thanks

2

IIRC, the sensors will only first appear when a value is actually published on MQTT.

3

They are already publishing, and the broker is distributing the data to the subcriptors. It’s kind of annoying as I can’t really figure the source of the problem. The log indicates that the sensors are being read but no entity appears to be used in automations.

4

Quite folishly, I closed my computer. After opening and restarting the PC now I can see the entities. It seems it needs a browser refresh, but I don’t know how to replicate this. It took me 5 hours to luckily get the result I needed and now I can read all the topics of the MQTT brokers as expected since the begining.

5

Hi daniel-blackbeard,

If you add a new integration, HA requires a restart to get it loaded into memory. Happens with all integrations.

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