TCP

The TCP integration allows the integration of some services for which a specific Home Assistant integration does not exist. If the service communicates over a TCP socket with a simple request/reply mechanism then the chances are that this integration will allow integration with it.

There is currently support for the following device types within Home Assistant:

• Binary Sensor
• Sensor

Sensor

To enable the TCP sensor, add the following lines to your configuration.yaml:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
sensor:
  - platform: tcp
    host: IP_ADDRESS
    port: PORT
    payload: PAYLOAD

Examples

In this section you find some real-life examples of how to use this sensor.

EBUSd

The EBUSd service enables connection to an EBUS serial bus on some home heating/cooling systems. Using this service it is possible to extract various metrics which may be useful to have within Home Assistant. In order to use EBUSd, you connect to it using a TCP socket and send it a command. The service will respond with the value it has received from EBUS. On the command line, this would look something like:

$ echo "r WaterPressure" | nc 10.0.0.127 8888
0.903;ok

You will notice that the output from the service is not just a single value (it contains “;ok” as well). To grab the value we’re interested in, we can use a Jinja2 template. The response received is injected into the template as the value variable. To use this value within Home Assistant, use the following configuration:

sensor:
# Example configuration.yaml entry
  - platform: tcp
    name: Central Heating Pressure
    host: 10.0.0.127
    port: 8888
    timeout: 5
    payload: "r WaterPressure\n"
    value_template: "{{ value.split(';')[0] }}"
    unit_of_measurement: Bar

hddtemp

The tool hddtemp collects the temperature of your hard disks.

$ hddtemp
/dev/sda: SAMSUNG MZMTE256HMHP-000L1: 39°C

With hddtemp -d you can run the tool in TCP/IP daemon mode on port 7634 which enables you to get the data across the network.

$ telnet localhost 7634
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
|/dev/sda|SAMSUNG MZMTE256HMHP-000L1|38|C|Connection closed by foreign host.

The entry for the configuration.yaml file for a hddtemp sensor could look like the example below.

sensor:
# Example configuration.yaml entry
  - platform: tcp
    name: HDD temperature
    host: 127.0.0.1
    port: 7634
    timeout: 5
    payload: "\n"
    value_template: "{{ value.split('|')[3] }}"
    unit_of_measurement: "°C"

Binary Sensor

The TCP Binary Sensor is a type of TCP Sensor which is either “off” or “on”. In order to use this sensor type, in addition to the configuration for the TCP Sensor, you must supply a value_on value to represent what is returned when the device is turned on.

To enable this sensor, add the following lines to your configuration.yaml:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
binary_sensor:
  - platform: tcp
    host: IP_ADDRESS
    port: PORT
    payload: PAYLOAD
    value_on: 1