homebridge-hunter-hydrawise is a Homebridge plugin that makes your Hunter Hydrawise irrigation controller available to Apple's HomeKit smart home platform.
MQTT is a popular Internet of Things (IoT) messaging protocol that can be used to weave together different smart devices and orchestrate or instrument them in an infinite number of ways. In short - it lets things that might not normally be able to talk to each other communicate across ecosystems, provided they can support MQTT.
homebridge-hunter-hydrawise will publish MQTT events if you've configured a broker in the plugin settings. Supported MQTT capabilities include:
- Irrigation controller events.
This documentation assumes you know what MQTT is, what an MQTT broker does, and how to configure it. Setting up an MQTT broker will not be covered here. There are plenty of guides available on how to do so just a search away.
You can configure MQTT settings in the plugin webUI. The settings are:
| Configuration Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| mqttUrl | The URL of your MQTT broker. This must be in URL form, e.g.: mqtt://user:[email protected]. |
| mqttTopic | The base topic to publish to. The default is: hydrawise. |
Important
mqttUrl must be a valid URL. Just entering a hostname will result in an error. The URL can use any of these protocols: mqtt, mqtts, tcp, tls, ws, wss.
When events are published, by default, the topics look like:
hydrawise/1234567890AB
In the above example, 1234567890AB is the serial number of your Hunter Hydrawise irrigation controller. homebridge-hunter-hydrawise provides you information about your Hydrawise devices and their respective serial numbers in the Homebridge log on startup.
The topics and messages that homebridge-hunter-hydrawise publishes are:
| Topic | Message Published |
|---|---|
controller |
JSON containing the current status of the irrigation controller and all the zones associated with it. |
Messages are published to MQTT when an action occurs on a device that triggers the respective event, or when an MQTT message is received for one of the topics homebridge-hunter-hydrawise subscribes to.
The topics that homebridge-hunter-hydrawise subscribes to are:
| Topic | Message Expected |
|---|---|
controller/get |
true will trigger a publish event of the current status of the irrigation controller and all the zones associated with it. |
controller/set |
A message in the form of <start | stop> <zone> [<duration>] where you can choose to start a zone with a given duration, or stop a zone. If no duration is specified, the zone will start using the next scheduled duration for that zone. |
Note
- MQTT support is disabled by default. It's enabled when an MQTT broker is specified in the configuration.
- If connectivity to the broker is lost, it will perpetually retry to connect in one-minute intervals.
- If a bad URL is provided, MQTT support will not be enabled.