Help with Home Assistant nodes in Node Red

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

Is there a way to pull data from a sensor?

I am working on a NodeMCU display to show the current value of a sensor in Home Assistant.
The sensor doesn’t change value often, and using the State-Change node works (an MQTT message is published when the sensor value changes), but it could be minutes between changes.

The Poll State node also works, but am I flooding my MQTT broker with data every 10 seconds?

The Trigger State node might work, but I can’t figure out how to trigger it to output the sensor value.

So, that’s my question- how do I trigger the Trigger State node to read the sensor?

[flamingm0e]

@stevemann

The Poll State node also works, but am I flooding my MQTT broker with data every 10 seconds?

Your MQTT broker can handle thousands of messages a second. Don’t worry about it.

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

@flamingm0e

Your MQTT broker can handle thousands of messages a second. Don’t worry about it.

Thanks, I am not worried about overwhelming my broker (though I did once accidentally fill the queue with hundreds of thousands of messages in just a few seconds and everything else slowed to a crawl).

So, I am polling every ten seconds, but my basic question is how do I trigger a poll?