Hello everyone, I’ve been dragging this question for a while because while annoying I could live with it but there might be a smarter way than what I’m doing right now.
I am using the mqtt home assistant auto discovery, which for the most part works great (thermostats could use some love though).
However, every time I reboot/ restart some of the items are unlinked from the things channels and they appear as “invalid link.”
Now of course the channel still exists and I’ve been manually correcting these when they happen, but just now I got hit with 11 items that got unlinked. I don’t understand what’s happening or if there’s any way to stop this behavior as I also don’t understand why yesterday only a couple items got unlinked but today I’m looking at 11.
I know this is caused only on devices added through home assistant based auto discovery, as other generic mqtt devices are fine.
Sure, no argument here. Only wanted to say that I did this for a long time and experience has taught me better.
I will give you a simple example. Take an ordinary binary sensor in HA. In my case it is a rain sensor indicating that it is either raining or not. From the official specs of HA there are about three variants how you can define such a sensor with the config topic.
None of these variants are recognized correctly by openHAB auto discovery. Instead you get a switch item that is non functional because it expects the openHAB item states “ON” and “OFF” while the sensor delivers “true” and “false”, which is perfectly fine in HA.
For auto discovered devices you cannot alter or change properties that would give you the opportunity to get the item working with openHAB.
Arguing with the maintainers felt like you get schooled and judged in “how about architecture is done right”. Sorry, but I do not need schooling. I need functional software.
That is why I finally gave up on auto discovery with HA items and switched to manual configuration. That works like expected and you are not dependent on the current state of the software.
Fair enough of course I recognize some of what you describe. It’s still very useful for new people to get things going quickly.
And I just might reach out to you to ask a couple of questions if you don’t mind I’m curious about how you go around the setting up of the mqtt things and topics.
thank you!
