Howto add MQTT Thing

[Larsen (Locke)]

Either auto-detection (doesn’t work well for many devices), UI (as @ubeaut described above) or text file.
While the UI is great for almost anything I still like to define my zigbee2mqtt things in a.thing file. This is because you have to define the channels anyway which makes it quicker (for me).

A good start with many examples is:

Zigbee2mqtt revisited: No more ugly transformations

I’ve been using zigbee2mqtt for quite some time, for details look here: and here: Recently I discovered a new option of zigbee2mqtt: attribute output. This option, in company with the mqtt2 binding, provides a nice solution. This option simply gets rid of the json-formatted output and transmits all attributes separately. You enable it via configuration.yaml. experimental: output: attribute The benefits are: no more json-encoded output => no jsonpath-transformation no more missing …

This way you don’t need JSON transformations anymore as all attributes are sent separately and can be directly attached to a channel.

Here is an example for a smart plug:

Thing mqtt:topic:PlugWaschmaschine "PlugWaschmaschine" (mqtt:broker:MosquittoMqttBroker) { Channels: 
   Type switch   : state     "state"     [ stateTopic = "zigbee2mqtt/PlugWaschmaschine/state",      commandTopic = "zigbee2mqtt/PlugWaschmaschine/set/state", on="ON", off="OFF" ] 
   Type datetime : last_seen "last_seen" [ stateTopic = "zigbee2mqtt/PlugWaschmaschine/last_seen" ]
   Type number   : power     "power"     [ stateTopic = "zigbee2mqtt/PlugWaschmaschine/power"     ]
   Type number   : energy    "energy"    [ stateTopic = "zigbee2mqtt/PlugWaschmaschine/energy"    ]
   Type number   : current   "current"   [ stateTopic = "zigbee2mqtt/PlugWaschmaschine/current"   ]
}

You save this as anyName.things under …openHAB-conf/things.
Then I usually create all items with “Add Equipment to Model” that you find in the channel tab of your new thing.