I am thinking out the software part of my home automation and was planning to use:
- MQTT as a backbone (this is a requirement as all my devices (ESPURNA based switches or my own devices) use MQTT as the communication bus)
- Home Assistant as the web frontend
- Home Assistant or MQTT Dash as the Android frontend
- Appdaemon as the automation glue
(I am very open to suggestions for points 2-4, I do not think I can leave without MQTT).
I have automated a wall switch that switches some lights with its relay, and also sends state information to MQTT.
These information are then picked by Appdaemon, which is currently directly plugged to MQTT (listening for events) and then sends orders (such as turn_on()) to Home Assistant.
This works.
Since Appdaemon is using Home Assistant anyway, I am considering listening to HA events instead of MQTT messages to do the same. This is easy using listen_event().
There is one problem though: Home Assistant does not track extra MQTT messages from my switch, specifically the fact that I can short-, long- and longlong-click on a switch. They generate different MQTT messages ("press" and "release_quickly" for the first one, "press" and "release_after_some_time" for the second one etc.).
Is there a way to track general MQTT communication with Home Assistant, which I could then retrieve via Appdaemon? (instead of having Appdaemon retrieving them directly from MQTT)
