Pixelblaze MQTT bridge for Home Assistant and more

Ideas and Tips
1

Thanks to davyhollevoet, there’s a Pixelblaze MQTT bridge! Check out out:

From the repo:

Small service that connects a pixelblaze to MQTT.

Mainly written to work well with a Home Assistant MQTT Light (default schema), but other MQTT-speaking things also work obviously.

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2

Sorry for being such a newb, is there another walkthrough for this with homeassistant?

3

Very nice!
I currently use OpenHAB with a websocket connection to the PB. It’s working, but has a few drawbacks. I also have a separate MQTT broker running so this solution is attractive. A few questions.

  1. How do I install the MQTT features on the PB? It doesn’t say in the repo.
  2. Is this a Websocket wrapper, so I could just stick with my websocket solution?
    The websocket implementation in PB doesn’t support brightness feedback. I can set brightness through Websocket, but if it’s changed from somewhere else (e.g the web interface), I can’t see this change unless I initiate a status request (and I don’t want to do that all the time).
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@Zugarelli,
This connects to Pixelblaze using the websocket, and to another MQTT service to act as a bridge. If you have stuff working with websockets already I think that will give you more control.

5

@Zugarelli, here’s how I handled the polling issue in the Hubitat integration driver:

  • The driver connects via websocket only when a command has been issued. In practice the time it takes to connect is not significant.
  • While connected, it polls hardware status every few seconds, so the user or program issuing commands has accurate feedback.
  • It stays connected for two minutes (user configurable) after the last command, after which it disconnects and goes back to sleep.
  • Left idle, the driver will wake every half hour to update hardware status and the program list, in case someone has changed them via the web UI.
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6

In case you do not want to work with an MQTT bridge, I’ve set up a Home Assistant Custom integration that may be easier to work with.

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