I’m fairly new with OpenHab and absolutely new with Homie so maybe this is user error, but anyway I’m asking to learn…
I have a robot vacuum which runs Valetudo on top of it’s stock firmware, this connects to my MQTT broker, from where OpenHab detects the Thing using the Homie 3 standard.
My actual problem is that some channels are not properly declared. E.g. according to Valetudo docs, the GoToLocationCapability should have separate command and response topic set in it’s configuration.
If I understand it correctly from some posts, the auto-detected things cannot be edited post detection.
Now my dilemma is whether I should redefine the whole Thing from scratch (using the already existing code from the current Thing spiced up with the missed information) or is there some more elaborate solution to this problem?
Another somewhat side question is about the configuration that the Homie binding generates, which contains IDs with # in their names, so like id: GoToLocationCapability#go, as far as I know # is an illegal char in id names.
Btw. I’m running OpenHAB 4.3.3 and Mosquitto 2.0.11 on Debian 11.11 “bullseye”.
I hope I included all relevant information (and used the proper category), if not please don’t hesitate to ask.
The easiest thing would be to just create a separate Generic MQTT Thing just for those Channels that were not detected correctly. While it’s usually the case that one Thing represents one device, that’s not a hard rule. You can have many Things represent one device.
Use MQTT Explorer to figure out which topics are missing and how the messages are formatted and go from there.
Homie doesn’t appear to be as widely used as the HoneAssistant MQTT convention so it seems likely OH may have a mistake in it’s code or Valetido does.
If also file an issue on the OH binding in case it’s the later.
Hmmm, that’s a good advice to separate the discriminate channels into a new Thing. Thanks.
I will investigate further. I saw some mentions of HomeAssistant in the MQTT, so I will give it a try, maybe that way I can make it work. (My goal is to make everything working with as little customization as possible, thus making it easier to maintain in the long term, when I will be more busy in the future).
My main problem with Homie is that I do not know enough of it to be able to tell whether Valetudo or the OH binding is buggy, so before I file an issue, I will have to further educate myself.
