I am new to MQTT (and home automation in general, I am much more in the systems and dev side), flashed a WiFi switch (Sonoff Basic), connected it to an instance of Mosquitto and Home Assistant and so far everything works fine.
When monitoring the Mosquitto bus, I see all kind of messages, such as
tele/hass1/LWT Online
tele/home/room1/switch1/LWT Online
cmnd/home/room1/switch1/POWER OFF
I recognize home/room1/switch1
which I defined on my WiFi switch, and the switch then sent some topics prefixed by cmnd
(command? that would be surprising as nobody manipulated the switch) and tele
(telemetry?). tele/hass1/...
is generated by Home Assistant.
Are there any standards or commonly accepted practices for the prefixes?
The MQTT documentation explains how topics are formatted but does not introduce any structure (except for topics beginning with $
) so I guess that, best case, it would rather be a best practice (or practice full stop).
/
, this is just wrong as it adds a extra null segment to the topic tree which is not needed and makes it slightly harder to use wildcards properly. – hardillb Mar 16 '18 at 20:34