Home Assistant integration clarifications

[LCuinu]

Apologies first...I'm no tech savvy genius
I need help getting my head around what is possible with Home Assistant and generally how it's done. I've come across a couple of Home Assistant integrations with the official stating that nRF52 devices are not compatible due to json support and another that uses protobufs? I've RAK4631's out in the field as repeaters (will get more as trackers) and some TTGO and T-Lora.

1. Will the official integration work if I have an ESP32 as the attached home gateway or just no go because of the nRF52 in the field?
2. Viewing nodes in HA. Do 'all' the nodes need their MQTT switched on or is the info passed through the gateway?
3. Do 'all' the nodes need importing into HA individually (manually) or are the entities/devices discovered and pulled in from the attached gateway node?

Thanks in advance

[ianmcorvidae]

Fairly simple questions to answer, luckily!

1.) As long as your MQTT uplink node is something that supports the JSON output, then integrations using that output will work, including the method shown in the meshtastic documentation for Home Assistant. So if your home gateway is an esp32, that should do fine.
2.) The information is passed through the gateway and the other nodes in the field do not need MQTT configured -- but if you want anything to come through from the default channel (LongFast), you should be sure to turn on the "OK to MQTT" setting, which is within LoRa settings, on any node whose data you want to see. If your gateway's connected MQTT server is local, it may not be required, but it'll usually be more reliable that way anyway.
3.) You do need to configure each node in HA individually. The setup in the documentation uses individually configured MQTT sensors (and some automations), since it's not a true HA integration. That being said, https://github.com/pdxlocations/ha-entity-builder-for-meshtastic is a tool that can automatically generate the configuration to be added into HA for you, for every node in a given node's NodeDB. This can be a good/useful starting point, or might even set up everything you would want for you.

[LCuinu]

That's absolutely fabulous! Thank you very much! I'll have a go inserting and adjusting the yaml myself. Thanks again.