DIY MQTT sensor, how to use in Home Assistant?

Configuration
1

Hello,

I have a DIY door sensor, that publishes 3 states: “open”, “closed” and “locked” by MQTT and I have prepared 3 miniature bitmaps. How can I make Home Assistant show the state of the door with the bitmaps in the GUI (and use the state of the door in automations)?

If this is a dumb or frequently asked question, please be gracious and point me to the documentation I should read.

Any help would be highly appreciated, thanks in advance
Ralf

2

The simplest way would be using the mosquitto mqtt broker addon and then configuring the integration for the connection.

Afterwards, you can add a mqtt sensor into configuration.xml.
Here is the reference:

And here is a simple example from my HA:

binary_sensor:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "espeasy0_button-A1"
    state_topic: "espeasy-0/button/button_A1/State"
    payload_on: "1"
    payload_off: "0"

It reads 1 or 0 from the mqtt topic espeasy-0/button/button_A1/State and converts it to on or off.

3

O.K., I already have the mosquitto plugin running and use shelly wifi switches by MQTT. But thank you for pointing me to the “MQTT Sensors” documentation.
Unfortunately all this answers only a small part of my question, especially not the part about the gui integration. In your example, you use a “binary_sensor” and I think by this HA knows how to handle it. But this doesn’t fit for my case.

Regards
Ralf