Home assistant/homie compatibility

Third party integrations
#1

Hello,

I have a request on the openmqttgateway github.
Asking to be compatible with homie convention

I’m investigating time on this but before going further i would like to know the degree of compatibility with home assistant.
My main concern is about the fact that several mqtt payload must be sent in case one needs to send a rf signal with some particular parameters.

Currently if you want to send a signal with a special protocol or pulselength with the help of the OpenMQTTGatewat you set it into the topic:
home/MQTTto433/433_1/PLSL_360 123456
In one mqtt message we are able to send 123456 and other parameters.

With the homie convention we will have to publish 3 messages:
homie/openmqttgateway/rf-send/plsl/set 360
homie/openmqttgateway/rf-send/protocol/set 1
homie/openmqttgateway/rf-send/set 123456

I would like to have your thoughts on that, can this example be implemented easily into home assistant or do I need to gather the 3 parameters into one publish message like 360,1,123456?

#2

I think that if the measurements are all related to the same pulse, they should go into one message.

I also think you should use JSON to distinguish the items in the payload, as this is pretty standard for MQTT these days, and HA can pull the values out easily.

#3

The homie convention is trying to solve a bigger picture problem than how to put as much data in a single payload as possible. It aims to standardise the way topics are structured, and if widely adopted would allow much better interoperability between different services and software that support it. In MQTT you either have structure in the topic, or structure in the payload. JSON takes the second approach and is fine until you want to integrate with another service/software, and then you need to define a specification for the JSON…

#4

Checking in here to see if there has been any progress in supporting Homie.

Homie is basically a hierarchy definition for MQTT. Benefit is that hierarchy elements- devices, nodes, properties- are self-describing. I’ve used it in some places, e.g. providing ModBus measurements using github.com/volkszaehler/mbmd.

It would be great if Homie was a first-class citizen of Hassio and I’d be happy to contribute e.g. an adapter. I’m more fluent in Go though than Python. Would there be enough interest to do so?

Cheers,
Andreas

#5

I guess the logical place to apply homie is to mqtt_statestream

#6

Mhhm. The question is not only about publishing device changes to Homio (which statestream seems to do?) but about being able to consume Homio devices.

OpenHAB does this out of the box and quite conveniently. It seems there is an HA plugin (https://github.com/nerdfirefighter/HA_Homie) but it appears to be abandoned.

Cheers,
Andi

#7

If you have a pressing use case then it could be worth resurrecting. In principle it would make integration of any device implementing homie a very straightforward process

HA Support for Homie convention and MQTT?
#8

Not sure if this counts as pressing; and I have not researched what in detail OpenHAB supports.

For what it’s worth, I’m author of https://github.com/volkszaehler/mbmd which provides meter readings for a number of ModBus meters including SunSpec grid inverters. The readings are available via MQTT and Homie where is latter is obviously easier to consume thanks to its zero-config nature.

#9

No homie extension for ha? As an angry openHAB user looking for an alternative, this is sobering.

#10

It will take someone with the motivation to create the integration, but it should not be much work