GPIO and Home Assistant

As part of moving my home server to solar power, I need a way of switching over to mains if there’s been a few grey days and the battery is getting low. I’ve attached a relay to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO to switch the charger input from solar to a MEAN WELL 100 W supply but integrating is surprisingly tricky:

• The rpi_gpio module uses RPi.GPIO which isn’t 64 bit clean and fails to compile on Ubuntu
• The remote_rpi_gpio module uses pigpiod which for some reason uses 20 % CPU when idle.

I settled on pi-mqtt-gpio, as most of my other custom integrations are over MQTT. The config is:

mqtt:
  host: localhost
  topic_prefix: host/keylime
  discovery: true

gpio_modules:
  - name: gpiod
    module: gpiod

digital_outputs:
  - name: mains_select
    module: gpiod
    pin: 17
    on_payload: "ON"
    off_payload: "OFF"

discovery is undocumented but enables Home Assistant MQTT discovery, so it’s zero extra config.

This should be usable on non-Pi hosts as well due to using the gpiod module.