MQTT - Looking for a solid guide to setup

I've had cgate running for some time on a Pi, and using Home Bridge. It's been very solid, works great.

I'm now looking to transition to Home Assistant, and whilst I can expose the Home Kit CBUS entities to Home Assistant, I want to simplify and remove the need to bounce off of Home Bridge. For that, I need to install the cgateweb MQ piece on the Pi - except I can't get it working.

I've installed cgateweb on the Pi where the cgate server is installed, so it's a localhost connection. I've also got Mosquitto on Homebridge setup, and have MQTT explorer connected so I can see any incoming traffic.

I've tried these sites for instructions:
https://github.com/the1laz/cgateweb (but appears incomplete?)
https://addictedtopi.tumblr.com/post/101165284373/setting-up-cgateweb-c-bus-to-mqtt-on-linux , tried this next but nothing happening.

So I don't know if it's the cgateweb install, the connection, the credentials, or whatever. Is there a way to get a view of what cgateweb is doing, check it's config?

I'm hoping I can get some inspiration from the hive mind here, thanks!

 

Are you using the clipsal SHAC at all?

 

No SHAC, @pspeirs , I'm using a CNI with cgate which has been rock solid for me. That still works, Home Bridge is still up and responding well, but cgateweb is not showing signs of life.

 

OK, sorry, I'm not across that. For shac, I have a nice udp transfer and native mqtt solution set up.

 

So, some partial success! I tried running
node /usr/local/bin/cgateweb/index.js

And that fired it up, so need to work out why the service isn't kicking in. New to Linux here!

 

What version of linux are you using? I was using the cgateweb service on Ubuntu 16.04 and it worked fine but there were changes with Ubuntu 20.04 (and I think even 18.04?) that made cgateweb not work.

What message do you get with - sudo service cgateweb status

 

I get this, it's a Pi running debian
pi@homebridge:~ $ sudo service cgateweb status

● cgateweb.service - cgateweb
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/cgateweb.service; enabled; vendor preset:
Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2021-11-13 13
Process: 1063 ExecStart=/usr/bin/nodejs /usr/local/bin/cgateweb/index.js (code
Main PID: 1063 (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)

So that does say it's loaded, but there's no life. If I stop the service and do:
node /usr/local/bin/cgateweb/index.js

Then cgateweb loads in the terminal window and MQ messages flow through to the broker. So I'm going to assume the service has a rights issue?

 

Once I looked at the above, I saw the issue. Now working with the ExecStart using just "node /....." as the command rather than "/usr/bin/nodejs......"

Thanks for the inspiration

 

My 'How To' here https://www.cbusforums.com/threads/...eb-mqtt-home-assistant-and-home-bridge.10746/

 

I used the python cmqttd lib ( https://github.com/micolous/cbus / https://cbus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html ) on an Odroid N2+ with Debian 11 and Home Assistant that communicates through a PCI (with rs232 to usb cable) to get my lighting groups working with Home Assistant. (cmqttd also works with a CNI).
It was pretty easy to setup. The hardest part (which wasn't difficult) was using systemd to set the launch conditions to ensure it booted on load and remained up.
So far it's been 100% reliable.

 

I'm finding cgateweb to be very unreliable, and will quite happily go to sleep for half an hour. At this point, there's no MQ traffic, and a connection to the cgate service from a Windows machine running Toolkit works perfectly. In my case, cgateweb and cgate are on the same Pi

@RobRam , is it as simple as spinning up a new Pi image, then running:

Code:

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt
$ python3 setup.py install

then

Code:

$ cmqttd --broker-address 192.0.2.1 --broker-disable-tls --serial /dev/ttyUSB0

(replacing 192.0.2.1 with the Pi IP)

Does this also surface the C-BUS network for Toolkit?

Thanks

 

I've found the same thing to be true with a raspberry pi 3 and it's been running for a year and a bit. The only issue I have is when only the router is powered on and off so I then need to also power cycle the raspberry pi as well. I don't know why everyone else uses the cgate + cgateweb method as it seems like a much larger pain and put me off from setting it up a few years ago.