MQTT HomeAssistant and AutoDiscovery

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
,
1

I am trying to figure out how to setup the MQTT HomeAssistant AutoDiscovery on OpenHab. I have the MQTT broker connected to Mosquitto which HomeAssistant is also connected to.

In HomeAssistant I have something similar to the following setup to publish to MQTT.

  • id: ‘1590942737754’
    alias: MQTT-Switch-Office-On
    description: ‘’
    trigger:
    • entity_id: light.act_unknown_type_4457_id_3230_level
      platform: state
      to: ‘on’
      condition: []
      action:
    • data:
      payload: ‘on’
      topic: homeassistant/switch/office/state
      service: mqtt.publish
  • id: ‘1590949077643’
    alias: MQTT-Switch-Office-Off
    description: ‘’
    trigger:
    • entity_id: light.act_unknown_type_4457_id_3230_level
      platform: state
      to: ‘off’
      condition: []
      action:
    • data:
      payload: ‘off’
      topic: homeassistant/switch/office/state
      service: mqtt.publish

However, I am unsure how to get these devices to show up with autodiscovery on OpenHab. Besides connecting the MQTT Broker is there something else needed?

Appreciate the help.

2

Were the devices auto discovered in home assistant? If so they should be in your inbox.

For example on tasmota when I set option 19 to 1(turn on home assistant broadcast) the light appears in both home assistant and openHAB.

3

I’ve no experience with MqTT auto discovered Things, but if they do not show up in the Inbox automatically, you may need to initiate a scan. Go to the Inbox, click the + icon at the top -> “Search for Things” -> MQTT. That should initiate a scan for MQTT Homie and Home Assistant devices.

But keep in mind, these are looking for a series of topics that follow a given standard that represents a device. This does not look for HomeAssistant instances and somehow figures out what topics it publishes to. See https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/mqtt/discovery/ for details.

Given you are just publishing some stuff to random topics and not following the HomeAssistant device standard, you will probably need to generate a Generic MQTT Thing and manually configure it to subscribe and publish to the topics.

1 Like
4

The devices were not autodiscovered in Homeassistant I am actually manually publishing the device states to topic homeassistant/switch/office/state. I was trying to figure out what was needed on the openhab from a topic standpoint. All I saw was the openhab subscribing to topic homeassistant/# so I was hoping it would find the devices automatically. :slight_smile: I also tried to do a refresh/search but alas nothing came back. I looked at the article sent but wasn’t able to fully discerned what topic had to be sent for the autodiscovered magic to happen so that I could tailor the topic on the homeassistant side.

Appreciate the help.

5

If you manually configured in home assistant then you will most likely need to manually setup in openHAB. The topics are the same to subscribe.

6

The HA MQTT Auto discover is for IOT devices that use the HA MQTT standard. I don’t know if HA actually published devices this way.

7

Ok, thanks