Segments support for Homeassistant MQTT discovery

[jbouwh]

Are you already using Valetudo?

No

Your questions

Hi, I am a maintainer of The MQTT integration for Home Assistant. I am not using Valetudo (I do not even own a robot vacuum :-) )

As a follow up to #760, Home Assistant 2026.4 will have support for cleaning Segments. (home-assistant/core#164983)
@jhbruhn opened home-assistant/core#166687 as he states that the available segment areas cannot be reported together with the status of the vacuum. I am not sure this is needed, as I think integrations like Valetudo just should implement the new MQTT options the way they are intended to work.

[Hypfer]

Hey, thanks for reaching out.
I'm more or less in a similar situation, given that I don't really use voice assistants 😄

Regardless, I guess it would be a useful thing to have and would be nice if HA and Valetudo could play well together there.

I totally agree with you that HA should not change its interface just for third-party software, because you'd never see the end of that.
That said, having reviewed the PRs, I'm not sure if that would be the case here?

Having dug into this, I think I see what @jhbruhn means.

So autodiscovery metadata is (I think) supposed to be very static and not ever change, unless you do firmware updates.
Fan speed enums, device identifiers and all that kind of stuff.

Vacuum Robot Maps (and map metadata such as room mappings) are not really that, because they are real-time state.
They also tend to change all the time, be it due to the robot discovering new rooms, it creating a new map or the user editing the map.

Thus, I'd agree that having the segment mapping as part of the autodiscovery payload is probably not the best idea, because that would be very dissimilar from the rest of the interface, given that the current fan speed also isn't part of the fan speed autodiscovery metadata.

What do you think?

Addendum:

(I do not even own a robot vacuum :-) )

What is really cool about modern vacuum robots is that they are quite autonomous.
You just throw them into a space, click "start" and then they start mapping out the space, cleaning it, splitting it into logical rooms etc.

They have gotten quite smart but also quite autonomous, so maybe that might be a confusing factor here?

[jbouwh]

HA Vacuum allows to update the segments dynamically, via discovery. May be it should be allowed to a have an empty initial segment list.

[jbouwh]

Because changing segments this will be handled as part of the entity config, not as a state update. It might not be impossible to update the available segments through the state, but this should be worked out as a new feature on top of #166737, which I could try to get merged as a beta fix.
I'll discuss updating segments via the state first, as I understand this might be a better approach.
@arturpragacz may be you can join the discussion?

[jbouwh]

I have discussed this and we decided to revert the changes in HA core, and reevaluate the way segments are to be configured.
So the feature will not be included in HA Core 2026.4. Hopefully we can add this feature at the next release. Then it will be possible to setup up segments though a state update.

[jhbruhn]

Thanks, I think this is a good decision.

[jbouwh]

home-assistant/core#166794 was merged, which adds support for updating segments via the state topic. It it expected to be included in the HA Core 2026.5 release.