I was using matthewall's MQTT with my old weewx instance and I think you're right I didn't have these problems, it just worked. It just begs the question, why would the retain flag matter at all like you say. The one thing you mentioned that I have never set with either MQTT publish extensions is the expire_after. Could it be without retain that the data is expiring immediately for some reason?
On Sun, Jul 12, 2026 at 6:19 PM Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote: > "[email protected]" <[email protected]> writes: > > > I realized that without the retain, the HA plugin had nothing to work > with > > because the timing on my weather data is so different depending on what > it > > is, my wind data is every 5 seconds and my archive period is 3 minutes > so > > all my other raw data from my weather station posts every 3 minutes as > > well. > > This doesn't make sense to me. Without retain, when weewx is connected > to the broker, and HA is connected (the normal case, should be true > almost always), then MQTT posts from weewx arrive at HA. If you are > sending data every three minutes (because your archive interval is 3 > minutes and you are sending archive data), then within 3 minutes of > starting HA the data should populate, and you should probably pick 180s > or 390s for expire_after. If this doesn't work without retain, then > something is very broken and we should figure it out, not tell people to > set something which is semantically troubled. > > I have retain=False using [email protected]:matthewwall/weewx-mqtt.git and > my weather data in HA is stable, but goes to unavailable when my weewx > computer stops transmitting. > > > Because everything is so out of sync I have to use retain or it will > > never get anything to work with. > > This doesn't make sense to me either. There is no need for > synchronization of various entities, as long as they are all valid. > > > Also as far as the LWT, I just AI'd it and it suggested that HA enjoys > > having that set. > > That is incorrect; HA is not a person and does not enjoy anything! The > point of the LWT, as I said earlier, is to post offline to the online > topic on client disconnect, so that the posting of online at connection > is withdrawn and the availability topic has the right semantics. You > should look at the json config that MQTTPublish uses, or your own > config, to see if that is correct -- and see the page I referenced > previously. > > > I did set up MQTTPublish and the HA plugin with json because I had no > > reason to break out the topic individually. > > What "HA plugin"? HA has "integrations", and something (formerly called > "add-ons") called "apps". The MQTT integration is built in. > > > My raw data from my weather station on the other had posts > > individually. > > What do you mean "raw", and how is that happening -- if you aren't using > MQTTPublish? > > > Sending json is nice because there's one MQTT message posted. If you > are sending archive data every 3 minutes (I do, but every 5), then > there's one message, with everything, logically consistent in time. > > With loop, whether things are in json or not, they aren't quite > consistent because data arrives to weewx at different times. As long as > the delays are small (sub 30s?), it's not a big deal. > > If you have wind every 5s, then putting everything in json might lead to > a full json every 5s, retransmitting previous values for other things, > and ingesting them into HA again. It would be better in my view to > split out wind to not be in json (or to be in a separate higher-rate > json) to avoid transmitting data that isn't really data. > > > Overall it sounds like you have found a configuration by guessing at > settings but that it isn't really grounded in a plan of how things > should be. I encourage you to examine what is being sent on MQTT and to > read the HA entity configuration, in yaml if you did it yourself, or to > read the autoconfig json if you're doing it that way. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/CABki8LdftYHBmkvySq%3Dc6sJ4EcTAdms0t6aufU7Di3--NGz_nw%40mail.gmail.com.
