I’ve been looking around to find a low-cost GPIO addition to Home Assistant and while this is offered with Arduino, it currently only works with USB. I have a large house with the most of my gear near the lounge but the rest in the garage. I wanted to be able to deploy an Arduino or RPi but connected via LAN. Alas, I came across mqtt-gpio-monitor which seems perfect as it allows you to control either the onboard GPIO or a PiFace (which I have) by sending MQTT messages to {topic}/in/{pin#}.
I’ve been chatting with the developer this evening (who also lives in NZ) and he’s advised that he built it for OpenHAB but does not use it any more. Sadly, it does not currently output MQTT messages when one of the eight (0~7) relay outputs on the PiFace is triggered but the mechanism is there as if you restart the script, messages are sent for all monitored (configurable in a .ini file) pins.
If you push one of the input buttons (0~3), you get a message output on {topic}/out/+ telling you what button (pin #) and what state; either 0 or 1.
If someone has the ability to look at 330 lines of code to see if feedback messages could be added, I think this would make an awesome addition to the hardware compatible with the HA MQTT sensor/switch components?
The remote GPIO node needs Ethernet too. I have a MySensors Ethernet gateway but the remote sensor cannot reach the host. Don’t want to add multiple nodes just to get the mesh network formed. Ethernet PiFace would be much simpler.
In mysensors 2.0 the gateway can have sensors too. So you can connect a gateway with sensors wherever you have Ethernet. No need for additional nodes or radio network.
Thanks but the gateway is at one end of the house (with GPIO in use) and I require another Ethernet connected device at the other end of the house with GPIO access. I know I can do it easily with ESP8266 but the PiFace is a much cleaner way of doing it with all of the I/O/s already broken out.
Maybe I’m not following totally? You can have multiple gateways connected. One at one side of the house and one at the other, and you don’t need to have radio on them if you only connect local sensors.
Thanks, didn’t know you could have two gateways without wireless module. Think I have a workaround for the missing code in the PiFace software which I’ll post when I test.