I’ve had Home Assistant set up for about a week. I initially started it out as just a test, as I wanted to control some TP-Link switches with Logitech Harmony Hub (no native support). I had a spare Raspberry Pi laying around, so got it done using Hass.io and Emulated Hue. Works nicely and I’m happy with that. I have since moved on to configuring some more stuff and wanting to get further involved.
Apologies if this is a dumb question, but I can’t find a straight answer anywhere. In almost all of the posts I’ve read and detail I’ve browsed online, MQTT seems to be what people default to using. I realise that this is becoming preferred for IoT and I’m fine with the idea of using it. But, what are the real world benefits to using it with Home Assistant?
As I say, I have found all the documents I need to set it up, I guess I’m just looking for opinions on why this is so important for so many. Also, as I haven’t set it up yet and already have a bunch of stuff in Home Assistant, would I need to start again, or does MQTT play nicely with my current config after installing the Mosquitto Broker add-on?
MQTT is “just” a way of getting things to talk to each other.
I use it for part of my presence detection, for Zigbee, and shortly for Z-Wave too. It’s not the only option out there, but where both things can use it already, it makes it easier to get them talking.
The alternative after all is that everything needs to know how to communicate with everything else if you want them to talk. That scales terribly badly. Imagine it like languages, if everybody speaks a different language, you have to learn the language of everybody you want to talk to. It’s the same here, MQTT is like a language.
So, people will use MQTT because it works. Nothing more complicated than that. You can add MQTT to your Home Assistant setup when you need it, or never use it.
There are several communication standards available and MQTT is one of them. If you have no devices that communicate via MQTT then (you may wish to learn more about it but) there’s no pressing need to implement it.
Should the time come when you do need, adding it will not disrupt your current installation of Home Assistant.