mochad_dispatch

mochad_dispatch allows you to connect your X10 security devices (door/window sensors, motion sensors, remotes) to home automation software like OpenHAB, Home Assistant or Domoticz

What exactly does it do?

mochad_dispatch connects to mochad (which reads messages from a USB receiver like the X10 CM15a) and listens for X10 security and button-press messages then publishes those to an MQTT broker.

It will automatically reconnect to both mochad and the MQTT broker. However, if a reconnect attempt fails for 60 seconds straight, mochad_dispatch will give up and exit.

How do I use it?

Run mochad_dispatch with a mochad hostname and a MQTT URI

$ mochad_dispatch -s hal9000 mqtt://mqtt.example.com:1883

Then subscribe to the appropriate device topics. The general format is

X10/MOCHAD_HOST/KIND/ADDRESS

where KIND is security for RFSEC alerts and button for button presses from an X10 remote. Note that button events are sent at QoS 0 and without the retain flag so they will not persist.

What about MQTT with TLS?

For TLS support use the '--cafile' option like so

$ mochad_dispatch -s hal9000 --cafile /etc/pki/tls/cert.pem mqtt://mqtt.example.com:8883

Troubleshooting

mochad_dispatch has been tested with mochad 0.1.16 and Mosquitto 1.4.3

Start by making sure your MQTT broker is relaying X10 messages by subscribing to the topic

X10/#

For example, using the mosquitto broker:

$ mosquitto_sub -v -t X10/#
X10/hal9000/security/C8:21:B2 {"dispatch_time": "2016-02-18T18:36:12.147877+00:00", "func": {"event_type": "contact", "event_state": "normal", "device_type": "DS10A", "delay": "min"}}
X10/hal9000/security/33:8C:30 {"dispatch_time": "2016-02-18T18:30:42.763780+00:00", "func": {"event_state": "normal", "device_type": "DS10A", "delay": "min", "event_type": "contact"}}

Dockerized App

Build the docker image (using the Dockerfile based on the jfloff/alpine-python image) and run the mochad_dispatch command. IMPORTANT: you must use the "-f" flag (to disable background/daemon mode) else the docker container will exit immediately.

$ docker build -t mochad_dispatch .
$ docker run -d -it mochad_dispatch mochad_dispatch -s hal9000 mqtt://mqtt.example.com:1883 -f

Dockerized App Full Stack Example

Run (and background) individual Docker containers to provide an MQTT broker, a MOCHAD daemon, and a MOCHAD_DISPATCH instance (assuming you've already built an image as described above):

$ docker run -d --name=mosquitto -p 1883:1883 -p 9001:9001 sourceperl/mosquitto
$ docker run -d --name=mochad -p 1099:1099 --device "/dev/bus/usb/005" jshridha/mochad:latest
$ docker run --link mosquitto --link mochad:hal9000 -d -it mochad_dispatch mochad_dispatch -s hal9000 mqtt://mosquitto:1883 -f