Guide to Connecting gBridge to Homey for Google Assistant

If you have the time it would be great if you adjusted the guide :slight_smile:
I think only one or two images needs exchanging.

Sure about that? In the tutorial in the start post (and in lots of other posts) itā€™s always gBridge ?

Anyway, tried both and also restarting the apps. Nothing is working :disappointed:

[edit]
When I try to turn on a light in Home, I see d0/grequest gets set to EXECUTE but nothing happens
When I do a Broadcast in Hub, I see nothing changing in Explorer. Before you could see all the topics getting updated. Also no more popup saying broadcast was successfulā€¦

Strange that it worked instantly for me.

EDIT: The topic should NOT be all lower case. This was shown because of a bug in MQTT Hub and do not try to do that.

Your protocol is set to Homie instead of Custom.
Tried changing that, not working eitherā€¦

@Fire69 Your settings look correct.

It probably has got something to do with the order of starting the appsā€¦when the Hub is started before the MQTT Client, things go mad. Iā€™m trying to pinpoint why.

You could try uninstalling the Hub, restart the MQTT Client app & re-install the Hub afterwards.

@HarriedeGroot I had the gBridge-integration working fine with my own broker bridged in between, but now I want to have your MQTT Hub connect directly. This works fine, but it seems your HA-version I installed through CLI normalized the device names. E.g.: Slaapkamer_dimmer became slaapkamer-dimmer. So thatā€™s the way all my devices are setup in gBridge. The new version from the Homey App Store doesnā€™t seem to do this normalizing of device names, so now the commands arenā€™t matching what I have in gBridge.

Before I go and change everything in gBridge to match up, is this a bug? Have I missed a setting? Or is it just the difference between the Homey- and HA-builds?

So just to be clear, topic should be gbridge or gBride? And protocol Custom or Homie?

When I do a Broadcast in Hub, should I get a popup that it was successful?

I tried disabling both apps, then first starting Client and a minute later Hub. Didnā€™t help. Iā€™ll try uninstalling everything :roll_eyes:

[edit]
Something weird is happeningā€¦
When I use the wallswitch I see this being added in the Hub logs so Hub sees it happening
When I use GHome to turn on a light, I see it changing in MQTT Explorer (but light doesnā€™t work) so it communicates with gBridge.

There seems to be a sync issue somewhereā€¦

@Wout_F Topic name should still be normalized by default. Itā€™s part of the Homie Convention. The new version of the Hub allows you to disable it under ā€˜customā€™ settings. What is your setting?

In general: Selecting ā€˜customā€™ protocol does not change the behavior of the hub. The only thing it does, is providing an additional set of options. Itā€™s called ā€˜custom,ā€™ because changing any of these settings will break the Homie Convention. The communication with gBridge is not based on Homie, so donā€™t worry.

@Fire69 The popups are removed from settings.
And did you try a reboot of Homey?

Yep, no luck.

I just unlinked gBridge in Home and uninstalled Hub and Client.
Iā€™m going to start from zeroā€¦ I suppose I donā€™t have to remove every device from gBridge also?

Got it working, thanks :slight_smile:

Iā€™m getting desperate, nothing is working. I used Explorer to delete every topic. Broadcast doesnā€™t fill the topics back inā€¦

Anyone got other devices that switches/outlets/lights working? Like Aqara Curtains or Devolo Radiator? I have the curtains working, but only as a switch. So Google Home sees it as a light switch and can turn it on or off. Tried MQTT Explorer and copied the topics etc, but no luck.

Maybe itā€™s just not possible (yet) ?

Neither :wink: If you are connecting directly to the gBridge MQTT broker then topic must be gBridge with your username afterwards MQTT topics are case sensitive.

If you are bridging MQTT brokers then you can translate gbridge/u123 to gBridge/u123

Replace u123 with your username

gBridge/u123

Check Homey MQTT Client log is showing a successful connection.

Client:

Hub:
image

So, what am I doing wrong? :smile:

I canā€™t see your Homey Hub settings - itā€™s right side truncated.

Do you have ā€˜normalizeā€™, ā€˜Include zoneā€™ or ā€˜Include Classā€™ switched on ? (should be OFF)
Do you have ā€˜Broadcast device state changesā€™ on ? (should be ON)

If you are only using gBridge I recommend not using ā€˜Customā€™ as it require more configuration and allows you to break things much more easily, (especially if you include zones and/or class)

I donā€™t see any device status updates being sent to the gBridge MQTT broker.

Tip - purge all the retained topics on the MQTT broker (using MQTT-Explorer) so you are not getting confused by old data. Now when you reconnect to gBridge the topic tree should initially be empty before MQTT-Hub starts to populate it. Once you are sure it was empty then wait until it is re-populated by MQTT-Hub and then post a screenshot with a device topic expanded. BTW going forward the store released beta v2.1.0 which I take it you are running will handle all this purging of topics (unless you change topics forcibly) which is great.

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Ok, changed it to Homie instead of Custom.
These are all the settings:


Not much to see except for the topic :slight_smile:

When I delete everything with Explorer, then do a Broadcast in Hub everything stays empty:

When I use Google Home to turn on/off lights, they start to appear but miss most parameters:
image

Do you have ā€˜Broadcast device state changesā€™ on ? (should be ON).

There seems to be no connection from Homey to gBridge so some config is wrong poss in MQTT Client.

Restart the MQTT-Hub (apps >> MQTT-Hub - cog icon top right ā€˜Restart Appā€™)

Not around much the rest of this evening Iā€™m afraid

That option isnā€™t available when I pick Homie as protocol.
But it was set when I had Custom as protocol.

I just donā€™t get why itā€™s not working anymore, it was working perfectly before the last Hub-updateā€¦

I think you need uninstall each app and reinstalled the MQTT Client first, set that up and then the Hub