Help with importing data received via MQTT bridge

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Hi all,

I’ve been looking into receiving data from an oil tank sensor into Home Assistant (exactly as described in this post, which I have successfully followed - Apollo Oil Sensor. )

My main Home Assistant Yellow node is hidden away in a cupboard and not really suitable to have the dongle and antenna attached directly, so at the moment, I have a separate Home Assistant installation on an old pi, which I have put in a more suitable place to pick up the oil sensor signal. This is all working fine, and I can use the data inside the satellite Home Assistant no problem.

I’d like to use the data in my main Home Assistant instance, so I have configured a bridge in Mosquitto on the satellite node, to forward just the data for my sensor, over to the main node. This is also working fine, right up to the point where I can see the data in MQTT-Explorer on the central node.

I’m just missing one last piece of the jigsaw, of how to actually get the data from Mosquitto into some sort of entity that I can use in Home Assistant.

On the satellite node, as soon as data was successfully being received into Mosquitto, I started to get things appearing automatically under the “Mosquitto broker” service inside the MQTT Integration page.

On the main Home Assistant node, I don’t see anything (I don’t even have the “Mosquitto broker” service inside the MQTT Integration there either though, so maybe I haven’t fully configured Mosquitto on the main node? I only just installed it for this project, as all my other stuff has always been ZHA or ESPHome up until now, I haven’t really used MQTT much before.) Mosquitto is definitely runing OK though, as I’m getting data into MQTT Explorer.

If anyone could point me in the direction of how to sort the last piece of the jigsaw it would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Dunc

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If you have the items getting to the main broker, you can set up MQTT sensors for them…

There are also MQTT switches, lights, binary_sensors, lots of things if those entity types are what you are using.

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Hi @Sir_Goodenough , thanks for your reply.

All makes sense now.

I was expecting that once data was in MQTT it would just appear in Home Assistant like it did on the satellite node.

I’ve now realised that it’s the “rtl_433 MQTT Auto Discovery” add-on that was doing that on the satellite.

I’ve now manually added a sensor and all is well. :slight_smile:

Thanks again for your help.

Cheers,

Dunc

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