How to use the tele messages from Tasmota to update the devices status in Pimatic?

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Hi everyone.

I have a question. My Sonoffs are sending the tele messages every 5 minutes or so with information about temperature, contact information from my light switches and pir sensors. All this is fine and good. But it is also sending information about the status of the sonoff relay state itself.

How can I use this information to update the status of my switch in Pimatic?

The problem is that sometimes (not very often, but it happens) the state topic does not get received by pimatic. I believe the sonoff might loose the connection for a second to the mqtt server, while it is posting the state topic, and then the status of the switch in Pimatic is not correct compared to what the relay is on the sonoff.
This wrong setting can go on until a new state messages is issued by the sonoff or I switch the relay in Pimatic myself.

So my idea is to use the tele messages to update the status of the switches in Pimatic.

I just don’t know exactly how I should go on about this. Do I really need to make a extra dummy device for all my devices and then makes even more rules, or is there an easy way to use the tele messages from my Sonoff to make sure that the state in Pimatic is correct?

Thank you for your help.

Example of my tele messages from sonoff is:
16:24:27 MQT: stat/doorlockoutside/STATE = {“Time”:“2018-06-18T16:24:27”,“Uptime”:“2T01:30:16”,“Vcc”:3.451,“POWER”:“ON”,

Kind regards Simon

@simonbove i dont know anything about mqtt but i do think you need extra devices, no matter how you do it.

I came up with a code you could use to extract the power variable.

curl -s "http://192.168.178.xx/cm?user=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&cmnd=Status" | grep -o -P '(?<=STATUS = ).*' | jq '.Status .Power'

This requires JQ to be installed on your pimatic system.

What the code does;
It retreives the status page in raw format.
The raw format is not in valid json format, so we GREP remove the part which makes it unvalid.
Now JQ can parse it, we go into .Status and select .Power.

The command result is either a 1(on) or a 0(off).

You can create a shell device to execute the command every 10 seconds and update a variable and in return update a dummy device. It is a bit of work but worth it i think. Makes it a bit more reliable

Try this,
i don´t know why, but the topic needs a slash, the stateTopic not

      "topic": "/cmnd/doorlockoutside/Power",
      "onMessage": "ON",
      "offMessage": "OFF",
      "stateTopic": "stat/doorlockoutside/POWER",
      "id": "doorlockoutside",
      "name": "doorlockoutside",
      "class": "MqttSwitch",
      "qos": 1
    },

@gleno0h hi.

Thanks for your reply.

I have been thinking about this method myself, but was hoping that there was an easier way to do it with tele messages the device sends anyway.
(also to avoid spamming the devices all the time with queries.)

I’ll see if anyone knows of this, otherwise I’ll do it the same way as you did. Just trying to avoid this since I have a lot of devices connected 😊

@michael-rudek
Hi.

I think you have misunderstood my post, or maybe I’m misunderstanding yours…

My mqtt devices are setup as follows, and it is working great with the state topic and cmd 99,98% of the time, it is the last 00,02%, where the state fails for some reason.

I’m trying to find a solution for using the tele messages from my Sonoffs.

  {
     "brokerId": "mqttbroker",
     "topic": "stat/doorlockoutside/cmnd/POWER",
     "onMessage": "ON",
     "offMessage": "OFF",
     "stateTopic": "stat/doorlockoutside/POWER",
     "echo": {
       "additionalNames": []
     },

@simonbove the “tele” messages appear in the pimatic log or somewhere else?

Edit;
How about the log reader? I think that is what you need.

https://github.com/pimatic/pimatic-log-reader/blob/master/README.md

It appears that it is not possible without creating a second device for all the Sonoffs i have, if I want to get this working.

If suddenly someone finds a solution, then please do write.