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ThomDietrich / miflora-mqtt-daemon

Linux service to collect and transfer Xiaomi Mi Flora plant sensor data via MQTT to your smart home system, with cluster support 🌱🌼🥀🏡🌳
MIT License
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home-assistant: Choose an "expire_after" value based on the configured "period" value #161

Closed iia closed 1 year ago

iia commented 1 year ago

I use this daemon for my MiFlora sensors with Home Assistant via Mosquitto broker.

My sensors updates every 24 hours. As it is currently, a fixed value of 3600 for expire_after (added in #138) made my sensors appear as "Unavailable" after 3600 seconds.

This is why I think it makes the most sense to use a value derived from the period of updates as configured in the daemon. Because a sensor can only be considered unavailable if there were no updates when there was supposed to be one.

ThomDietrich commented 1 year ago

24 hours seems unreasonably long. Anyhow,...

I totally agree with your argument. The 60 seconds is equally ambiguous. The goal should be to expire after one or multiple periods, including a grace period. Correct?

Maybe a factor would be better suited? str(int(sleep_period * 1.5))

ThomDietrich commented 1 year ago

Btw could you please test how this relates to #149

iia commented 1 year ago

Hi,

24 hours seems unreasonably long. Anyhow,...

Well, indoor plant soil properties usually don't change that quick. Plus with less frequent polling, hoping for a longer sensor battery life.

I totally agree with your argument. The 60 seconds is equally ambiguous. The goal should be to expire after one or multiple periods, including a grace period. Correct?

Exactly, here the 60 seconds is an arbitrary grace period.

Maybe a factor would be better suited? str(int(sleep_period * 1.5))

Agreed. I'm going to push the changes to this PR.

iia commented 1 year ago

Btw could you please test how this relates to #149

On it. Will let you know.

But it seems for Home Assistant the expire_after value already solves the: the dog swallowed the sensor problem.

As in this case the old values will be available as retained by the MQTT broker but eventually, based on the expire_after value, Home Assistant will indicate that the sensor is unavailable.

iia commented 1 year ago

@ThomDietrich I tested #149 with my Home Assistant setup. It works as expected with MQTT retain enabled. The older values are retained but after the expire_after duration Home Assistant shows the devices as unavailable.

ThomDietrich commented 1 year ago

Perfect.