I run HA on a VM in my QNAP NAS. This runs MQTT and I have things like Govee, Zigbee, Ring and Droplet working fine with it and I am using usernames and passwords, different ones per thing talking to MQTT, and it all works.
I have a Raspberry PI 4B doing the Zigbee to MQTT and Zwave JS. I installed a RTL-433 software defined radio dongle in it and verified I can see my (and my neighbor’s) gas meter.
This is the service file (password removed) I am using (and, yes, I am a bit of a noob on this part of HA):
I interpret this log message that the Pi is successfully connecting the RTL-433 service to MQTT running on my HA VM.
2026-09-03 07:40:48: New client connected from 192.168.253.11:32900 as rtl_433-d8a0ffff016c (p4, c0, k60, u’RTL433’).
Yet, it had been running for over 24-hours and I have not seen a single new device pop up on my MQTT integration. I even rebooted it this morning to see if that would help, which it did not but kind of proved to me it will at least connect upon a reboot.
I don’t necessarily care if I see everything at this point. If I get too much, I will work on filtering, later.
I seem to remember some kind of setting in that integration to make devices or not. Read the documentation again and check the integration page.
I had one, turned that on and immediately got like 80 devices that I had no clue what they were, had to delete most of them. That was a few years ago. Got rid of it.
time : 2026-09-02 08:09:19
model : SCMplus id : 110380735
Protocol_ID: 0x1E Endpoint_Type: 0xDC Endpoint_ID: 110380735 Consumption: 85837 Tamper : 0x1301 crc : 0x330F Meter_Type: Gas Integrity : CRC
I am a little confused as to which entries I use for the MQTT sensor to tie the two together, and I think it is in the state_topic: field? I got this from a Google AI search. I have to think the Endpoint_ID: or ID of 110380735 (same value between both) is involved.
Interesting. I do not know where to find that installation or how to do it. I would not mind just collecting “everything” and filtering it out after the fact. All I would get is my neighbor’s gas meter.
Yoj can skim it as @Vaughan66 said by creating the sensors manually in configuration.yaml. If you only have one sensor it shouldn’t take much time. That’s how I do it with all my 433 sensor. If I let discovery run it would pick up dozens of sensors quickly. Do you know how to get the subscribe topic from mqtt.explorer?
This new verson that doesn’t use mqtt might be more suitable for you if you can get it on your rp4 as it uses an integration to find new devices.
It looks like two of them must be installed on the Home Assistant Server locally and the radio, too. Are you talking about me installing the Python Library.
If you are using mqtt then best way to look at it is to use mqtt explorer. It will make it much easier. So download that first and use it to connect to your mqtt server on your RPI4.
Go to your rtl section that should something like this above. Open up the sections until you find the sensor you are looking for. In this example I select temperature_c and then on the right hand side of the screen I copy the subcribe topic and it will look like the line below.
using whatever app you use to look at configuration.yaml open it up and if you don’t already have an mqtt section copy the code below. You will have to adjust your code to suite your topic, name probably to reflect your sensor.
save it and then again in HA go to settings/tools/yaml and select the manually configured mqtt entities buttons and it will create a sensor in my case temperature. If you run into problems show me the topic in right hand corner and the value.
What I added in my configuration.yaml and the box is checked to add manual entries.
mqtt:
- sensor:
- name: "Natural Gas Usage"
state_topic: "rtl_433pi/SCMplus/110380735"
unit_of_measurement: "ft³"
device_class: gas
state_class: total_increasing
value_template: "{{ value_json.gas }}"
unique_id: "natural_gas_meter_01"
Try this. Go to Settings > (Developer)Tools > YAML configuration reloading section > Manually configured MQTT entities. If that doesn’t work, give your HA a good old restart.
