What was happening was that it was creating the entities in HA, but it never populated them with data.
I have always used individual topics just to simplify things (moreso in my mind I guess) I will fool around with this more, but I guess I'm not that motivated because it's working now as is. I'll apoligize in advance if this takes a while to debug. On Wednesday, July 15, 2026 at 8:38:20 p.m. UTC-4 [email protected] wrote: > expire_after is HA configuration option. Currently by default > MQTTPublish/MQTTHomeAssistantConfig does not set it. > More information, > https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/sensor.mqtt/#expire_after > > On Wednesday, 15 July 2026 at 08:20:12 UTC-4 Rob M wrote: > >> 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/31ae719f-81b2-44e1-b752-70b999fb9495n%40googlegroups.com.
