Owntracks MQTT

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi, I am a brand new Hassio user. I am trying to setup owntracks to de-activate our alarm when my phone is near the house.
I am trying to use the simplest setup to get things going. So I have used the embedded mqtt. I have the following settings in configuration.YML. I have DNS through Duck DNS working and can remotely access Hassio.

mqtt:

device_tracker:

  • platform: owntracks
    mqtt_topic: “owntracks/#”
    events_only: false

My phone settings Android are;
Mode Private: MQTT
Host: xxx.duckdns.org Port 1883 Use websockets On
Indentification : Authentication on
Undername Mark
Security: TLS off
Parameters :clean session on keep alive 3600

Status on phone.
Configuration incomeple
Endpoint state

I really have little knowledge on MQTT.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mark

2

first and foremost get your phone to connect to your HA Owntracks instance. This will require some port forwarding in your router. Turn off websockets, I don’t believe its required(I don’t use it in my config).

After that is all connected and working then you can move on to the automations. Essentially all you’ll need is an automation that checks when your state goes from “not_home” to “home” and have it run the service to disable your alarm.

3

I have the same setup all working.
Set up port forwarding in your router to forward 1883 to your Hass.io (mine is at 192.168.1.46 internally)
Turn off websockets in Owntracks
Use an MQTT client (i Use MQTT.FX) in a computer inside your network and subscribe to your MQTT broker using a subscription to “owntracks/#”

You will see messages pop up every time you push the update on your mobile phone Owntracks application
My phone is listed as ‘owntracks/simon/Simons P20 Pro’

where "simon’ is the username in Owntracks Identification form and ‘Simons P20 Pro’ is the Device ID on the same form. You can add anything short as the tracker ID, it will appear in the incoming MQTT message, mine is ‘ph’ and my message looks like this

{"_type":“location”,“tid”:“ph”,“acc”:36,“batt”:100,“conn”:“w”,“lat”:-36.84xxxx,“lon”:174.76xxxxx,“tst”:1532312860}

Discovery in hass.io found my phone (I had to comment out ‘events_only’ in configuration.yaml as I was at home)

I used ‘states’ in the bottom of the left hand menu on the hass.io user interface and looked down the list where I saw:

device_tracker.simon_simons_p20_pro

It reports I am ‘not_home’ right now as I am at work.

4

Thank you for your help.
I have port forwarding 1883 to Hassio. I have turned off websockets in own tracks.
Sorry but I don’t understand why I need to subscribe to a MQTT client such as MQTT.FX??
In Owntracks I have the host as my home DNS?

5

You don’t have to use MQTT.FX, I just used it to look at messages coming in from Owntracks. It was more convenient then trying to see anything in HASS.IO. In fact does anyone know if you can even view MQTT messages in Hass.io?