MQTT_Statestream

Third party integrations
1

Currently testing Home Assistant in a VM, running version 8.5 based on the disk Image provided (and having done some updates) using VirtualBox on a Macbook Pro.

Is my understanding of mqtt_statestream wrong? I presumed it would update the broker when the state of something changed. Is this not the expected behaviour?

I have the following in my configuration.yaml:

mqtt_statestream:
  publish_attributes: false
  base_topic: topic/homeassistant
  publish_timestamps: true

My mosquitto instance (running on a different machine) receives the data and populates the topic with the relevant data, but then never updates it. The only way I’ve found to get updated data is to restart Home Assistant from Developer Tools which defeats the object of having mqtt. Are there any additional steps I need to take?

2

Most questions about Statestream go unanswered and it has been a tad frustrating to get it working, but I have succeeded.
My Statestream entry looks like this:

mqtt_statestream:
  base_topic: homeassistant
  publish_attributes: true
  publish_timestamps: true
  include:
    entity_globs:
      - sensor.*_temperature
    entities:
       - light.frontporch_zb_light
       - switch.officedesk

And it works. I learned that you need to restart HA after adding this to config.yaml, but my broker immediately started getting data that updates constantly. I am using Mosquitton running on an RPi and my HA instance is running inside Proxmox on a separate machine.
For testing, I added an MQTT node to my Node Red instance (also on the RPi) and see json data:

{"topic":"homeassistant/sensor/attic_conditions_temperature/last_changed","payload":"2023-09-17T15:44:06.108752+00:00","qos":1,"retain":false,"_msgid":"916b4cc50316ee67"}

My temperature data updates constantly. My switch status updates within a second of turning it on or off.

{"topic":"homeassistant/switch/officedesk/state","payload":"on","qos":1,"retain":false,"_msgid":"21e4ddb83d7914db"}
{"topic":"homeassistant/switch/officedesk/state","payload":"off","qos":1,"retain":false,"_msgid":"0634d313751bab56"}

Now if I could figure out how to get the timestamps in local time, I’d have everything I want.