MQTTSpy... heard of it?

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I’m trying to climb the hassio rope for the first time… and have gotten as far as to installed a couple of configuration editing tools IDE and Configurator… but Im now trying to test my installation of MQTT.

I’ve followed the MANY instructions… (all of which differ… just enough to frustrate me) so I’m not sure if Ive got it right or not…

I’m am not a command line commando so doing any meaningful work thru a PUTTY session of in the console in IDE is not fun… So I’m looking for tools that can be used instead… why work hard when I can work smart. I found this tool just now and was wondering if anyone else has had some experience with it “MQTTSpy”

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2

I’ve used it. Can you connect to your broker? If you can, put # in the topic to see all mqtt traffic on all topics.

3

No I just discovered it today… Still at work… I’ll give it a try tonight.

I’m a software engineer… and Im finding that the documentation for HA is not always “correct”… and really vague sometimes… Newbie growing pains!

-Aaron

1 Like
4

I can highly recommend MQTT Explorer.

2 Likes
5

I’ve used:

  1. MQTT-Spy
  2. MQTT-fx
  3. MQTT Explorer

I prefer MQTT Explorer. It uses a split-pane with a tree-view displaying all MQTT topics in the left and a selected topic’s details on the right. Many other useful features are also available in the right-hand pane.

1 Like
6

Let me put it this way… MQTTSpy is what you use until you discover MQTT Explorer…

7

Another +1 for mqtt Explorer

8

I use MQTT-Explorer and its really great imo

9

Ok… thanks for all the input and help… I’m a babe in the woods… and you folks are keeping me alive!

I’ve got a very vanilla version of HA installed right now (on a “pie”) with only my Ecobee thermostats being displayed. The thermostats are active and reactive… that is when I manipulate them in HA the device’s state changes as does the actual device… On Off… etc.

With respect to MQTT Exporer…
So… Ive got MQTT Explorer installed and I can connect … or at least I think its connected and I am subscribed to ‘#’ and ‘#Sys’. I know that the tool is working because when I use the test.mosquitto.org connection I can see it updating the left hand panel.

I keep getting a “Disconnected from server” bubble (in red) Is this normal activity… like refreshing?

Example
Example1046×780 78 KB

But I see no activity on the left hand side.
Q1 Do I need to use port forwarding to interact with the broker from the same LAN
Q2 LOL How do I use this thing!

Inside HA I went to the service page and set the service to mqtt/mqtt_send and pasted this

[quote]{
“topic”:“home-assistant/switch/1/on”,
“payload”:“Switch is ON”
}[/quote]
into the Service data field… I have no switch installed so I expected an invalid object return (Im a C# developer) I got a failed to call service… expected string for dictionary for service … got none… which I hope is a good thing!
-Aaron

10

Nope.

Difficult to say what’s the cause without more information, such as the MQTT broker’s logs.

11

Ask and ye shall receive… I’m running ver 4.3
This is repeated…
[INFO] found MQTT_USER on local database
1560912513: Client home-assistant-1 already connected, closing old connection.
1560912513: Socket error on client home-assistant-1, disconnecting.
1560912513: New client connected from 192.168.1.2 as home-assistant-1 (c1, k60, u’*****’).
1560912513: New connection from 172.30.32.1 on port 1883.
1560912514: Socket error on client , disconnecting.
1560912514: New connection from 172.30.32.1 on port 1883.
[INFO] found homeassistant on local database
1560912515: Client home-assistant-1 already connected, closing old connection.
1560912515: Socket error on client home-assistant-1, disconnecting.
1560912515: New client connected from 172.30.32.1 as home-assistant-1 (c1, k60, u’homeassistant’).

The *** is my password…

**** EDIT ***
So I think I figured it out… the red bubble that is… In the ingratiation I had the user name wrong… and I had and entry in the Config yamal file which I think was not needed…

So now I gotta figure out how to send message… the struggle continues!