I am running rtl_433 on a Raspberry Pi 0 W to read a set of Acurite temperature sensors. I would like to send this data to my HA server which is on the same network (different machine). I already have the Omnilink integration which I believe uses an MQTT broker to get messages about the Omnilink devices so I presume I don’t need to add MQTT to HA. I think I know the command on the RPi to send the received Acurite info out to an MQTT broker but what do I need to do on the HA side to make this work and to add my Acurite sensors as HA devices?
I would be very grateful if anyone could please help me to get this working.
P.S. I am running HA OS 10.0 under Virtualbox on a Mac.
I managed to send a message to the MQTT broker with the iOS MQTTtool app so I have the broker accessible. Now how to add Acurite sensors to HA and have MQTT messages update their status (temperature).?
Have you taken a look at the rtl_433 HASS addon? I use that plus the MQTT autodiscovery to load everything into home assistant. It’s been bulletproof for me and I’ve been running it since 2020.
Please correct me if I am mistaken but I thought this add-on was if you were going to connect the RTL SDR to your Home Assistant server machine. In my case I am running RTL 433 on a RPi on the dame network
You’re correct. I only suggested it because putting the dongle on your Home Assistant server might be more efficient and save you from needing an additional machine on your network.
I also mentioned the addon because it might be worthwhile to look at the MQTT auto-discovery. That might work for your setup without doing anything. If nothing else, that addon should give you some ideas for loading your sensors into Home Assistant.
Both are great suggestions. If the machine running HA was in a location that could receive the sensors, I would do it. At least I now am able to talk to the MQTT broker on HA. Now I have to see about sending the RTl data and associating with devices. Maybe Autodiscovery will help with that.
I have a basic question. I wanted to use the MQTTtool to send a message to HA to turn on/off a switch. MQTTtool permits me to Publish a message to a Topic. I presume that each device is addressed as a topic (beginning with home-assistant?). How do I determine what the Topic is for a particular device? Or do I have this all wrong? The example in the docs (using a different client) is: mosquitto_pub -h 127.0.0.1 -t home-assistant/switch/1/on -m “Switch is ON” . If, for example, the device I want to switch is “Switch FR lamp”, what would the payload look like?
I made some progress. I entered the command on the RPi to read from the RTL_SDR:
rtl_433 -F “mqtt://:1883,user=,pass=,retain=1,devices=rtl”
and I can see the MQTT messages when I listen on HA. However, I don’t see any devices being created that associate with the sensors so I don’t know ho to access this information. What am I missing?
@wryandginger Wait a minute. Since I was not running the RTL on my HA server, I did not install the RTL-433 addon to HA. Do I need that to have HA parse the MQTT messages and do the Auto-discovery and add devices? If so, where do I find the RTL-433 addin?
I don’t think you need the full rtl_433 addon if you’re posting the data to the MQTT server. I think the autodiscovery just reads the MQTT and makes entities for whatever it discovers, but I could be wrong.
If that’s not working, you can always do a manual MQTT sensor