Additional "device_id" field in config.json

[hoalex]

Hi there,

I think it would be great if Homie could optionally publish its MQTT messages under devices/name instead of devices/device id. That way, multiple ESP8266s would be easier to distinguish, as one could simply name them -- for example -- "kitchen", "living room" and so on in configuration mode and then access them by that name via MQTT.
I guess that the current approach was chosen mainly to avoid naming conflicts, therefore I suggest using an optional statement in the setup() block à la:

Homie.useNameForPublish(true);

What do you think? :-)

[jpmens]

name can contain a descriptive text such as Light relay in living room, which is great because it allows, say, a Web interface to display this clearly. As an avid hater of white space in topic names (and file system path names) I think this would lead to some confusion. (Of course people could suppress white space in name if they don't want it (light-relay-in-living-room).

I tend to think this calls for an additional setting (sub_topic ?) which ought to be in the configuration, as we did for base_topic in #44.

My 0.01c 😄

[marvinroger]

@jpmens This is what I wanted to do, an additional device_id field in the JSON configuration file. It would adhere to the following rules, as stated in the convention:

Each device must have a unique device ID. This ID MAY be composed of lowercase letters from a to z, numbers from 0 to 9, and it MAY contain -, but MUST NOT start or end with a -.

@hoalex an Homie.useNameForPublish(true); method would not fit as Homie sketches are meant to be portable.

Does it sound good to both of you?

[jpmens]

👍

[hoalex]

Sounds perfect 👍 Thanks for looking into it!

[marvinroger]

This will land in 1.3.0! The new device_id field is at the root of the JSON config.

[marvinroger]

Released!