If your house already talks to itself through Home Assistant, drone detections should land there too — not in a vendor’s walled garden. This guide shows the wiring: a receiver that publishes MQTT, Home Assistant listening, and two automations that are genuinely useful. Everything here runs on your LAN.
Prerequisites
- A receiver that publishes MQTT — commercial units increasingly do, and DIY builds (our ESP32 and SDR guides cover the hobby path) can be pointed at any broker
- Mosquitto or any MQTT broker on your LAN
- Home Assistant with the MQTT integration enabled
Step 1 — the sensor
Point your receiver at the broker, then declare it in Home Assistant. The minimal version tracks the last detection; the JSON attributes carry the whole record:
mqtt:
sensor:
- name: "RID last detection"
state_topic: "site1/gate2/detection/rid"
value_template: "{{ value_json.detail.serial }}"
json_attributes_topic: "site1/gate2/detection/rid"Step 2 — an automation worth having
A notification on every detection trains you to ignore notifications. Filter instead. This one alerts only when a detection repeats within five minutes — a hovering aircraft, not a passing one:
automation:
- alias: "RID repeat detection alert"
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: sensor.rid_last_detection
condition:
- condition: template
value_template: >
{{ (now() - state_attr('sensor.rid_last_detection',
'previous_seen_at') ) < timedelta(minutes=5) }}
action:
- service: notify.mobile_app
data:
message: "Repeat RID detection: {{ states('sensor.rid_last_detection') }}"The honest boundaries
What this integration cannot do: it sees only broadcast-compliant drones (an RF-spectrum layer is a different purchase), it depends on your LAN staying up, and MQTT alone does not give you a legally weighted evidence trail — timestamps and retention policy are your job. We document the payload fields in full on the MQTT output page.
Failure modes from our own setup
Three gotchas cost us an evening each: Home Assistant silently drops JSON attributes if the payload exceeds the buffer — truncate what you do not need at the receiver; topic names with spaces break automations in ways that only show at reboot; and if your receiver reconnects aggressively after Wi-Fi blips, broker rate limits will eat messages — set a sane reconnect backoff at the source.
References: payload schema on our MQTT doc; open-source receiver firmware at OpenDroneID. Checked 2026-09-11. When a hobby setup needs to become five nodes with correlation and retention, that is what our screening and reports are for.
Content last reviewed: 2026-09-11. Config tested against Home Assistant’s MQTT integration; adapt entity IDs to your setup.