Three years ago A. Zeil published here on Hacker News their Easy MQTT Handler [0], a multi platform desktop tray app to glue Home Assistant to PC, to enable executing arbitrary executable commands on the PC from Home Assistant. The single-exe approach and ease of use got me hooked from day one. Served me flawlessly all these years. Recently, however, I had the need to expand the functionality, and given there was nothing moving on the Github repo for three years, I decided to hard fork it and to continue the development. Hence, Easy MQTT Handler 2 now brings a bunch of new features, amongst them, the ability to SEND data to Home Assistant on start up turning it into HA entity on the fly. This is useful to announce various states from the PC to Home Assistant as needed. My use case that prompted me to fork is to be able to multi boot a PC fully remotely from Home Assistant: the PCs multi boot is controlled by Terrabyte BootIt UEFI, which also provides a multi platform command to restart and boot into any operating system. So Easy MQTT Handler was able to command the PC to boot into another operating system, but it couldn't tell which operating system was booting last, as it lacks any PC-to-HA communication features. This where Easy MQTT Handler 2 comes in: it can send some unique identifier to Home Assistant so that Home Assistant can control the whole flow from start to finish. Hopefully people find this useful. Thanks. [0]
https://github.com/andzeil/easy-mqtt-handler