MQTT-Docker setup on RaspberryPi

Overview

I have a bunch of environmental sensors and in my home and recently added 4 Kaufha PF12 smart plugs. I am only interested in using them to begin monitoring power usage of some big items in the house. In the past, I have always pushed data directly from ESP8266s to my serverless Node running on Vercel. That in turn pushes data to a cloud hosted MongoDB database and an Angular dashboard. [yes, thankfully all that can be done for free].

Ok enough backstory, with the recent addition of the smart plugs and after discussions with my buddy John #BostonEnginerd, he suggested that I try out HomeAssistant. Finally this is what I wanted to acheive. Also to have a clean deployable, shareable and isolated solution, I chose to dockerize everything and to run on any spare Linux box I can find, in my case an old Raspberry-PI3b. You can choose other hardware.

Hope this helps and inspires. Enjoy!

Install Git [if missing]

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install git
git --version [check to see if installed]

Install Docker and Docker-Compose

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
curl -fsSL test.docker.com -o get-docker.sh && sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker pi	[add pi as default user]
docker version / docker run [to test installation]
sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev
sudo apt install python3-dev
sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip
sudo pip3 install docker-compose
sudo systemctl enable docker

TLDR

git clone XXX my-folder
cd my-folder
### you should get a directory structure like so,
└── mqtt-docker-pi
├── docker-compose.yaml.# the docker-compose file that orchestrates the entire install
├── hass				# An empty folder required for volume mapping for home-assistant
│ └── config
├── mosquitto			# The folder required for volume mapping for mosquitto-mqtt
│ ├── config
│ │ └── mosquitto.conf	# pre-populated configuration file that you can modify
│ ├── data
│ └── log
├── mqtt-node			# the mqtt-node relay server that pushes data to the mongo cloud api
│ ├── ... express node files not shown for brevity
│ ├── Dockerfile
└── README.md

# make sure you cd into the folder that contains the docker-compose.yaml folder
 1. docker-compose -f docker-compose.yaml up -d
 2. docker ps to check for running containers. you should have 4.

The portainer service is optional and I added it for completeness because it provides a web dashboard in managing all your docker containers without messing around with the commands. Personally for me, I find it easier to just use command line.

To access portainer : http://your-pi-ip:9000 To access home-assistant: http://your-pi-ip:8123

Home Assistant

The mqtt-node server is listening specifically to topic = hass-topic.
The automation.yaml for home-assistant contains the following,

- service: mqtt.publish
	data:
	topic: hass-topic
payload_template: "{ \"kwh1\": {{states('sensor.kauf_plug_total_daily_energy')}},\n
\ \"kwh2\": {{states('sensor.kauf_plug_total_daily_energy_2')}},\n \"kwh3\":
{{states('sensor.kauf_plug_total_daily_energy_3')}},\n \"kwh4\": {{states('sensor.kauf_plug_total_daily_energy_4')}}}\n"

Adding Kaufha to ESPHome

1. In the http://ha-server:8123/config/integrations screen click on the
2. Then you will be able to add the newly discovered ESPHome enable device.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you our on your home automation journey.

Some useful Docker commands

If you are not using portainer and want to user command line, here are some useful commands.

1. docker ps -aq | xargs docker stop | xargs docker rm // To stop and delete all docker containers.
2. docker rmi container-id // To delete docker images
3. docker ps // list all running containers
4. docker ps -a // list all running and stopped containers
5. docker logs container-id // useful to look at logs of a container