Homie convention - Githubissues

oriolrius commented 7 years ago

Hi, first of all let me congratulate for such good project. I love it and I'm investing quite time on testing what you explain, so thanks a lot.

I just want to ask if you considered on following the [Homie convention](https://github.com/marvinroger/homie) on top of the MQTT layer? I used to use OpenHAB and now I'm migrating to Home Assistant and in all devices that I integrate using MQTT I follow that convention, I think it's very useful.

Regards and thanks your opinion about it.

Oriol Rius

1technophile commented 7 years ago

Hello,

With pleasure, Yes I considered it but didn't put my hands on it yet. It can be a good point to add some convention into the MQTT world, I will check that.

oriolrius commented 7 years ago

Nice, thank you for your feedback. I appreciate it.

1technophile commented 7 years ago

Hello,

What do you think about this convention interpretation, as I'm not yet an homie user I would need some comments

Device: openmqttgateway Nodes: rf-node, ir-node temperature-node, humidity-node

Properties between (): openmqttgateway(list of device properties from convention) rf-node (433tomqtt(not settable), mqttto433(settable)) ir-node (irtomqtt(not settable), mqtttoir(settable)) Temperature-node1 (temperature(not settable)) Humidity-node1 (humidity(not settable)

433mhz to MQTT would give: homie/openmqttgateway/rf-node/433tomqtt --> 12344343

MQTT to 433mhz would give: homie/openmqttgateway/rf-node/mqttto433 --> 12344343

oriolrius commented 7 years ago

It makes sense, it seems a very good initial approach. Don't forget to report the rest of the variables of the convention is very useful to monitor devices. You have all details here:

https://github.com/marvinroger/homie

It's fast to review.

1technophile commented 7 years ago

Asked to HA community if homie is compatible with home assistant, waiting for feedback. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/433mhz-infrared-ir-to-and-from-mqtt-on-esp8266/6779/156?u=1technophile

animavitis commented 7 years ago

i have https://github.com/animavitis/mqtt-gateway for ESP8266. Its based on this great project, but is developed in platformIO IDE & homie, so for sure its possible :)

IoTPlay commented 5 years ago

Adding another vote for Homie support on this closed issue.... Did you look at https://homieiot.github.io ?

1technophile commented 5 years ago

Issue is still open ;-)

Yes I took a look, and has now OpenHAB support auto discovery with Homie this request is making more and more sense

NorbertHD commented 3 years ago

Over 2 years have passed since your last comment, is there still hope for the Homie support in the near future?

1technophile commented 3 years ago

Not sure of the interest on this one as the current discovery is working already with Openhab and hass. Which controller are you using ?

NorbertHD commented 2 years ago

Thank you @1technophile for the answer. I have a ESP-WROOM-32 controller and want to read Xiaomi Mi Flora Plant Sensors. But with the uncertainty if and when Homie would be implemented, I thing I use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and ThomDietrich/miflora-mqtt-daemon. Regards, Norbert

1technophile commented 2 years ago

@norberthd with which software are you going to use the daemon or the gateway ?

NorbertHD commented 2 years ago

openHAB 3.2

1technophile commented 2 years ago

Thanks, is OpenHAB + Homie convention discovery proposing more features than OpenHAB + Home Assistant convention discovery ?

NorbertHD commented 2 years ago

I don't know if Homie or HomeAssistant convention is better. I started with miflora-mqtt-daemon when openHAB and OpenMQTTGateway had not yet HomeAssistant autodiscovery. But miflora-mqtt-daemon runs unreliable and I wanted a low power gateway near the flowers so I looked at OpenMQTTGateway. I will try/investigate HomeAssistant autodiscovery some time.

Thank you!

xanderificnl commented 2 years ago

Hi,

I think homie has a lot of advantages. It's self-contained, small, concise and framework agnostic.

Take this example - formatted as how you'd see it via MQTT-explorer - for instance:

homie/
    switchbot-meters/
        $name It's actually a switchbot and less fancy, but a man can dream
        $state ready
        $nodes living-room,kitchen,garage
        living-room/ {kitchen/, garage/}
            $name Living Room
            $properties temperature,humidity,battery,rssi
            temperature/ = 22
                $name Current temperature
                $unit °C
                $datatype integer
            humidity/ = 65
                $name Relative humidity
                $unit %
                $datatype integer
            battery/ = 100
                $name Battery left
                $unit %
                $datatype integer
            rssi/ = -51
                $name Received Signal Strength Indicator
                $unit dBm
                $datatype integer

Why this is useful:

You can write a single script to subscribe to MQTT and have it ingest all your data into influxdb. After all, if there's an update to 'homie/switchbot-meters/living-room/temperature' you already know to set measurement to $unit and label to $name.
Automated warnings, 'homie/#/$state == lost'
Ingesting data becomes standardized. OpenHAB automatically recognizes homie devices and it's sweet!
It requires no inherit knowledge of the system that's using or providing the data. Unlike HomeAssistant, there are no redirects to state_t and avty_t -- I don't have to look up any extra information to figure out what the abbreviation means and I don't have to look up which unit belongs to unit_of_maes (i.e. units['ssri'] = dBm)

I do feel there's a lot of reasons more why homie is preferred - but most of that comes down to vendorized data. Whenever I've had to deal with HA's MQTT convention, I've ended up spending more time in the documentation that actually solving whatever problem I'm having. I don't actually mean to bash on HA - but I'll admit there's some frustration.

In short: homie is self contained, concise and provides all the benefits of being clear and standardized. It also boils down to avoiding vendor-lockin. You can easily move your data to another platform.

1technophile commented 2 years ago

Hello,

I will welcome any PR that implements Homie discovery convention. I can help also pointing to the good parts of the code.

xanderificnl commented 2 years ago

I'd love to take a crack at it, but I'll admit - I haven't done any (real) work in C/C++ and I've yet to get OpenMQTT working*

* a small aside: the issue is that even with the switchbox right next to it - it only picks it up sometimes - whereas https://github.com/devWaves/SwitchBot-MQTT-BLE-ESP32 has no issue. I've been lost on where to start debugging - perhaps you could give me a pointer?

DigiH commented 2 years ago

Hi @xanderificnl

a small aside: the issue is that even with the switchbox right next to it - it only picks it up sometimes - whereas https://github.com/devWaves/SwitchBot-MQTT-BLE-ESP32 has no issue. I've been lost on where to start debugging - perhaps you could give me a pointer?

Is it a SwitchBot Bot you have, or any other SwitchBot device? I'm sure the switchbox was just a typo, right? What exactly do you mean it only picks it up sometimes? The changes initiated by another SwitchBot controlling device, only sometimes or only after a while?

Which OpenMQTTGateway binary do you have installed that you are seeing these problems? Possibly try the esp32dev-ble-cont binary to see if this helps with what you are seeing.

xanderificnl commented 2 years ago

Hi!

Thanks for the reply. It's a Switchbot Meter Plus, and my first BLE device - and I've wanted a real excuse to setup OpenMQTTGateway for awhile now - so it's the first thing I did.

I assumed there was something I wasn't doing right, so I was fiddling a lot with settings and various options so I'll do my best to recall (it was only yesterday... but I did try a lot of things)

pressed the button on the meter - short presses didn't seem to work;
send a MQTT command to enable SBS1 en later another SMBT (iirc) which I found in your (DigiH's) decoder repository;
lots of random things and options.

Almost certainly it's a combination of things I did, but I never did get more than one or two temperature / humidity readings. So I'll grab another esp32 and try the binary you're suggesting. I'll open a new issue and tag you with the new results.

Cheers!

DigiH commented 2 years ago

Almost certainly it's a combination of things I did, but I never did get more than one or two temperature / humidity readings. So I'll grab another esp32 and try the binary you're suggesting. I'll open a new issue and tag you with the new results.

For the SwitchBot Meters it should not be necessary to install the esp32dev-ble-cont binary, the default esp32dev-ble will be fine and should give you a SwitchBot Meter reading about once every minute.

Please try monitoring your MQTT broker messages with an app like MQTT-Explorer, from which you can also paste some messages here if the problem persists.

so I was fiddling a lot with settings and various options so I'll do my best to recall (it was only yesterday... but I did try a lot of things)

That could have caused some of the problems of seeing less messages than you actually are expecting. Are you using Platformio to make all the changes and fiddling? ;)

If so, and if worst comes to worst, you can always re-download the fresh source and start from scratch.

Hope this helps.

1technophile commented 2 years ago

Regarding the Homie convention, I think we should have a kind of separate Python script that detects the "gateways" and apply either Homie, either Home Assistant convention. There are a lot of programs that publish sensor data as a gateway:

amr2mqtt
rtl_433
OMG
ESPurna
...

Instead of replicating the code into each of these, the python script could push HA or Homie discovery following user preferences. This script could be added as an Addon into HA or a binding into OpenHAB.

RTL_433 as such implementation for HA, https://github.com/pbkhrv/rtl_433-hass-addons/tree/main/rtl_433_mqtt_autodiscovery but I think it could be extended to other projects and conventions.

xanderificnl commented 2 years ago

I've been thinking about the approach used by the remote decoder. Simply have OMG publish raw data to MQTT and have a script smash and squish the data into the homie format. It'd be relatively easy to write another adapter to export into the HA-format. FWIW, OpenHAB natively supports homie.

Is that also what you're suggesting, but as a gateway agnostic approach? I'd be curious of something like Telegraf could be used.

1technophile commented 2 years ago

Yes, I think that works well. To sum up: OMG -> gateway driver - converter - Homie convention driver -> OpenHAB Theengs -> gateway driver - converter - Homie convention driver -> OpenHAB

I haven't used Telegraf so challenging to say.

1technophile commented 1 year ago

Closing this, if anyone wants to open a PR feel free.

1technophile / OpenMQTTGateway

Homie convention #20