MQTT sensors unknown

thopton · January 5, 2025, 4:30pm

Hi Folks

I’m hoping someone can guide me on a issue that cropped up and has me completely stumped

I had 19 sensors, 58 entities being published to my HA broker that were working fine up until yesterday but now all showing as unknown.

They stopped working when I tried but failed to set up zigbee 2 MQTT integration for an additional sensor that ZHA wasn’t giving me the control I needed, or when I updated home assistant core maybe, either way I did an update and wish I hadn’t!

I’m pretty confident my MQTT config files are good as I haven’t changed them since values changed to unknown.

The 19 sensors are all showing in a test with MQTT explorer listening to my HA broker so I’m mystified why they are not showing in my dashboard

I’ve tried numerous restores from backup files but to no success,

Any pointers from this forum would be very much appreciated

ddaniel · January 6, 2025, 8:06pm

Is z2m is running?
If not probably that is the reason why you don’t see anything in mqtt.
Z2m latest upgrade did broke some installation that probably didnt have coordinator type specified in z2m.

thopton · January 7, 2025, 8:16am

Thanks for your reply Daniel

No it’s not running but then I never did. I did try restarting and an update of the Zigbee2mqtt addon which I think caused the issue with my current set up in MQTT broker.

I can’t connect my Zigbee coordinator as I believe it’s already locked to my Zigbee home automation service, and I believe I cannot have ZHA and Z2M running off the same coordinator (which is sonoff 3 usb dongle plus v2).

Do you think I can revert to my original set up or would you suggest I buy another coordinator to set up Z2M? I’m at a loss having spent an age trying to find a solution.

ddaniel · January 7, 2025, 10:14am

Yeah I think that you should run only one. Never tried but I think that you can’t run both of them on same coordinator at the same time.

I think you should decide will you be using zha or z2m. And then use that. I think that over complicating things is not the best way to do things.

thopton · January 7, 2025, 12:15pm

Agree in hindsight that was a mistake but I can’t seem to get MQTT reporting back, I have tried deleting Z2M and MQTT integrations then just reinstalling MQTT but I still end up with functioning MQTT broker but home assistant failing to read the entity values

ddaniel · January 7, 2025, 12:46pm

Ok, but you have to set z2m and mqtt.

I done this long time ago, but go and check z2m page as there are detailed instruction on how to set everything up.

In z2m you definitely need correct address and port for mqtt broker, ( in may case ha ip address and port 1883 but I’ using docker compose ) username and password for mqtt. You also need to enable homeassistant in z2m.

This is how my config looks like maybe it help you. This is for z2m

homeassistant:
  enabled: true
mqtt:
  base_topic: zigbee2mqtt
  server: '!secret.yaml server'
  user: '!secret.yaml user'
  password: '!secret.yaml password'
  keepalive: 60
  reject_unauthorized: true
  version: 5
serial:
  port: /dev/ttyACM0
  adapter: zstack
  baudrate: 115200
  rtscts: false
frontend:
  enabled: true
  port: 8080
  url: http://192.168.8.40:8080

secret url for server is

server: 'mqtt://192.168.8.40:1883'

thopton · January 7, 2025, 2:06pm

Thanks for you time David appreciated

Unfortunately I’m still hitting a brick wall with your guidance and all other guides online

To clarify I do t have any z2m devices currently and although I thought this would be ideal for one z2m device I wanted, it’s not worth the hassle of losing the 19 devices I had already pushing Jain packed to HA and appearing in my HA dashboard. My priority is to get these back over setting up Z2M

I have tried again to remove Z2M add on and integration but HA still isn’t seeing my MQTT broker.

I’m not clear why Z2M would disrupt my HA from reading MQTT broker and lost without a paddle

ddaniel · January 7, 2025, 2:25pm

I must say I lost you somewhere.
You have one coordinator.
You have set up zha to use that coordinator and added some devices to zha integration.
Now you would like to set up zigbee2mqtt because you have some device that is not supported by zha.
To run zigbee2mqtt you need to set up mqtt broker.

Mqtt broker in home assistant will give you data only if you have some devices that are integrated in home assistant and are using mqtt protocol for communication or you have devices that are not integrated in home assistant but you configure it to communicate with your broker.

Broker set up in home assistant is straight forward. You need broker ip address, usually ha ip but for haos might be different, port usually 1883 and you need username and password. Usually you will create user like mqtt and give it a password and use that as username and password for mqtt. I think that all other vaules are just left as default, maybe you need to enable discovery in mqtt integration if it is not enabled by default.
And I think that is all for mqtt broker.

As we concluded earlier you can’t have the same coordinator on the same time running on zha and z2m.

Edit:
If you are using haos I think, although I’m not sure, that you have to install mqtt addon for official repo. Start addon, probably configure it first, and use that addreass for mqtt integration. You probably will see on addon something like http://something when addon is running.

thopton · January 7, 2025, 2:33pm

Hi Daniel thanks for your continued support

To clarify I have never used Z2M to date, my MQTT devices are from a 3rd party controller nothing to do with Z2M. They publish successfully to my MQTT broker in HA, this never stopped.

However HA recently stopped reading the values, all my entities are displaying as ‘unknown’. I don’t think it’s a problem with MQTT integration because I can see the packets arriving. It seems to me that HA is no longer able to subscribe to the data

ddaniel · January 7, 2025, 2:40pm

There is a good app mqtt explorer. You can install it, if haven’t already. Maybe you should check with this first to see what is going on.

thopton · January 7, 2025, 4:32pm

I have this installed already and data is flowing perfectly fine into the MQTT broker

ddaniel · January 7, 2025, 5:27pm

The only thing that come to my mind is that maybe something is miss configured in home assistant broker.
If you havent already reboot comp, sometimes it does help.

thopton · January 7, 2025, 7:22pm

I tried a complete reboot and my whole system has gone dark, I’m fearing the worst… any ideas on next steps?

ddaniel · January 7, 2025, 7:55pm

What type of instalation are you using?
Dont worry probably is fixable. If isnt the worst that can happen is to install it again. Its not the end of the world.

thopton · January 8, 2025, 6:32am

Phew it’s back!

I’m running on a Raspberry pi 5

still think this is a config or setting stopping HA from accessing the mosquitto broker, data is flowing into the broker but HA not able to read it

My config was fine before

config.yaml
mqtt:
  binary_sensor: !include binary_sensors.yaml
  sensor: !include_dir_merge_list sensors/

sample of mqtt sensors.yaml

## milesight WS101 Push Button ##
  - name: "Push Button Battery"
    unique_id: "Push Button Battery"
    state_topic: "HA/MILESIGHT-WS101/Battery-level"
    value_template: "{{ value_json[0].value | round(0) }}"
    unit_of_measurement: "%"
    device_class: battery
    qos: 1
    force_update: true
    device:
      identifiers: "Milesight-WS101"
      name: "Milesight WS101-Push"
      model: "WS101-Push"
      manufacturer: "Milesight"

  - name: "Push Button"
    unique_id: "Push Button"
    state_topic: "HA/MILESIGHT-WS101/Press-type"
    value_template: "{{ value_json[0].value }}"
    device_class: 
    device:
      identifiers: "Milesight-WS101"

this is what my mqtt exploer looks like:

one thing i noticed was homeassistant is showing offline???

is there another place in the yaml file directory where mqtt access credentials are stored?

or somewhere else in the config i need to explicitly say HA should access the mosquitto broker and or topics?

Sjoerd · January 8, 2025, 7:27am

I got same issue when i update zigbee2mqtt to 2.0.0.2 (from 1.42.0-2)

Although all lights still work from the GUI - node-red became completely useless

ddaniel · January 8, 2025, 8:28am

I’m not facing similar problems like most after latest updates. But I’m running everything in docker compose.
Maybe you guys should consider moving it from haos to docker.