Dear clever people,
I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I have an OVMS (open vehicle monitoring system) module in my car which sends metrics via MQTT to my Home Assistant instance via the Mosquito add-on. I have it going via HiveMQ as that was the easiest way I could get it to integrate securely and use it whilst away from my home WiFi, using LTE. It’s all working well but I have ongoing issues with gaps in data, presumably caused by transient availability issues, which then result in transient data spikes to what is presumably a retained MQTT message as the y-axis values of the spikes are usually identical. The OVMS module doesn’t give me any configuration options, but seems to send QOS 0 messages (looking at MQTT explorer and HiveMQ). I have the sensors set up using yaml in HA.
These spikes cause problems further down the line with automations/calculations etc. If I publish a blank message to the relevant topic to “clear” the retained message it sorts things out for a while but then recurs. I’ve scoured the documentation and forums and experimented with all sorts of templates and availability settings. The only thing I’ve found that works reliably is to set up a second trigger template sensor as below. It works but isn’t very elegant and seems like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut. Is there a simpler approach I could use within my MQTT yaml to filter these states out please?
here is an example of a working MQTT sensor
- name: MG ZS SoC MQTT
unique_id: mg_zs_soc_mqtt
state_topic: ovms/xxxx/xxxx/metric/v/b/soc
unit_of_measurement: "%"
device_class: battery
And here is the template that works:
- trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: sensor.mg_zs_soc_mqtt
not_to:
- unknown
- unavailable
- none
not_from:
- unknown
- unavailable
- none
sensor:
- name: "MG ZS SoC"
unique_id: mg_zs_soc
unit_of_measurement: "%"
device_class: battery
state: >-
{{ states('sensor.mg_zs_soc_mqtt') | float(1) | round(0) }}
And here’s an example. All the raw MQTT sensors show a similar spike at identical times when it happens.
Any suggestions for how I could improve my MQTT yaml would be gratefully accepted!
Thanks
