Forecast for the day is a heat advisory. If we haven’t already been under one, having one today was really bad news. I took advantage of not being able to work out in the yard to get caught up on the checking account and paying the couple of bills that were sitting on my desk. Old guys have a weird sense of fun.
Once this was done, I wondered what else I would do with my time, so I busted up a loveseat hide-a-bed that we moved from Attleboro to here and had it in the basement. We did not always have a dehumidifier running down there, so Jenny is convinced that it is now a gigantic mushroom. Happy wife, happy life, so I dismantled what I could with it in the basement, depositing the metal guts into the dumpster. Then, with Jenny’s help, we moved the carcass up the outside stairs to the backyard for the night.
While working in the basement on that, I reminded myself that I have wanted to get the basement temperature and humidity readings from the Raspberry Pi 3B+ that is down there collecting that data for both an old school Flask web site and a more new school Grafana dashboard. What I really want is this data in Home Assistant. I had set up an ESP8266 with an DTH22 sensor on it, but this gave not the best accuracy, and was just redundant, as I already had a solution in place. I just needed to figure out how to fling this data to the Home Assistant server, which is ironically not 6 inches away from the Raspberry Pi with the better sensor on it.
Enter MQTT.
I had good success with sending the temperature, but getting both temp and humidity sent in a single message put me straight into the “advanced” end of the pool. This caused me to relearn all about MQTT and, in particular, the paho-mqtt Python library that I was using. Much more research was needed, but that would have to wait.
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