Mqtt state empty

Configuration
1

Hi,

i’m working with Home Assisntant for quite a while now. I love it :slight_smile:

Now i came into a situation where i was even unable to find anything usefull on the net.

I have the following scenario:

I created an mqtt sensor for a very basic mqtt message:

- platform: mqtt
  state_topic: "my/topic"
  name: "Time to event"
  expire_after: 2400

The my/topic message will populate every 15 minutes and the payload is a plain string like “2 weeks” or “10 days”

The configuration itself works great. If the message gets send everything is displayed correctly. But after around 2 - 5 minutes the state of the sensor turns to empty. (not unavailable!)

What did i miss here? I have another mqtt sensor which sends floats only in the same way and this one is correct over the whole time.

Thanks for your help!

Tobias

2

Maybe try to add force_update ?
It could be 15min between updates is too much for HA

3

@koying i already tried that. What makes me wonder is that it works with the other sensor

4

Are your MQTT messages “retained” ?
All of mine are, so not sure what happens if they are not…

image
image763×455 18.5 KB

5

okay my fault just a stupid mistake while generating the data. I was always testing in bash and then scheduled it via cron. What i didn’t thought of is that in a cron env there is no “terminal”. The generation itself exec a command in docker so to do this instead of

docker exec -it container "echo hello"

it has to be (non interactive)

docker exec container "echo hello"

So totally not Home assistant related :slight_smile: