Mqtt Control – Control your pc from Home-Assistant

After a long long search for a simple way for a bi-directional communication between my PC and Home-Assistant, i decided to develop a small Mqtt client called “Mqtt Control”. this client allows me to send messages to my desktop and display them, lock, shutdown or restart my computer. i can even take a snapshot of my desktop and send it back to Home-Assistant as Mqtt Camera image. more than that i can send telemetry from the computer to Home-Assistant that contains CPU usage and Temperature, Free and Used Memory, HDD info and more.

The client is Dot.Net framework based and can be downloaded from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mqtt-control/.

after the installation complete, go to the application path under program files and this is how it looks like:

The sample configuration files folder contains yaml files for the Home-Assistant configuration.
there is another files called MqttControl.exe.config which is the Application Configuration file, this file contains the application configuration of the mqtt server (Broker) Address, Username and password etc.

• mqttserver: The Mqtt broker Address.
• mqttuser: The Mqtt Username (default is homeassistant)
• mqttpass: The Mqtt Password.
• devicename: The name of the pc (used in topic name, like “/homepc/restart”).
• updateinterval: Interval for sending Telemetry to Home-Assistant (in seconds).
• autoSnapshot: Automaticly Include Snapshot in the Telemetry (by interval).
• publishDriveInfo: Include Drive info in the Telemetry.
• debugMode: create file called “debug.json” that contains the published data.

in order to control / send messages to your pc use the following topics:

• Restart: /pc_name_in_config/restart/
• Shutdown: /pc_name_in_config/shutdown/
• Lock: /pc_name_in_config/lock/
• Restart: /pc_name_in_config/restart/
• Send Message to the desktop: /pc_name_in_config/message/ and payload {“message”:”Text to diasplay”}.
• Take snapshot: /pc_name_in_config/snapshot/

*** Important Note: Set the Application to run as administrator, it is needed for getting the cpu data ***