Hi,
I’ve been building small nodemcu (esp8266) devices and utilizing mqtt autodiscovery to quickly add and montior them via hass, this works really great <3
I’m using this for some hydroponic systems, so most of my devices are maintaining simple control loops, and have a single sensor and a relay/valve/motor. If those control loops are implemented in hass (as it is now) it means that my system is fragile due to centralized control, (I have catastrophic consequences if my wifi/hass/mqtt/etc dies) and I’d prefer if my small devices are able to maintain their control loops autonomously, and for hass to only set the sensor tresholds (configure the control loops)
For this I’d need a way to input some integer to a remote mqtt autodiscovered device.
looking into https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/mqtt/discovery/ It seems to me that the only way to interact with my custom autodiscovered device is via binary switches (if it registers some switch entities) and I was wondering, could I have “input boxes” or “sliders” that I can register somehow?
I’m up to implement different inputs like these myself, and submit a PR, but since I’m not super familiar with hass internals etc, I’m not sure if that’s a good idea and aproach? Is there any other aproach that would be better?
(One idea I had is that the device can “learn” tresholds from what hass sends it, and if not connected to mqtt, maintain last tresholds it noticed. but this seems hacky, I’d much rather be explicit with this.)
Thanks!