Yes, that I understand, but how do I know that the device has returned the same command (i.e., how do I check that the loop has been closed)?
I could monitor the MQTT traffic, I suppose, but I don’t see how I would know when I check my HA app on my phone whether the irrigation controller has received the message.
Well, there are several possible reasons to it. Your switch’s configuration may be incorrect, your payload may have wrong quotes around it etc… and here you need to debug a little bit.
We are here to help if you provide as with your config and data you see in state/command topics.
As tom said, payloads are strings so nothing to do with “it does/does not accept json”.
you send commands to the command topic. if device reacts to the command, it publishes its state to the state topic. so if you publish a command and can see a message in the state topic, you have control and feedback, don’t you?
Hope now you see that you can live without using templates if you want.
Apologies for the slow reply, Ahmad – it’s been a busy week. Yes, once I realized Tom’s point that they are not json commands, I was able to figure out the first question: the strings had different spacing.
It’s all working now, but looking in my config file I see that I already do use json templates (where I had cut and pasted solutions). They look simpler than I’d realized, so I might try them out after all. 