@bgunnarb I like @eiten 's solution for you.
Personally, I am not a fan of using cloud/public brokers. Thus I am curious about your system and there is something about it from which I can learn. I would like to understand why you cannot deploy your own mosquitto broker.
I see your set up as 3 sensor groups defined by the channel used
#define MY_RF24_CHANNEL ChannelOfSensorGroup
Each sensor group has some number of sensors and one MQTT GW on ESP8266. On the MQTT side, do you distinguish between gateways by using a different host name?
Something like:
#define MY_MQTT_PUBLISH_TOPIC_PREFIX "mygateway-nOf3-out"
#define MY_MQTT_SUBSCRIBE_TOPIC_PREFIX "mygateway-nOf3-in"
#define MY_MQTT_CLIENT_ID "mysensors-nOf3"
#define MY_HOSTNAME "ESP8266_MQTT_GW_nOf3"
//#define MY_CONTROLLER_IP_ADDRESS 192, 168, 178, 68
#define MY_CONTROLLER_URL_ADDRESS "test.mosquitto.org"
#define MY_PORT 1883
I must assume your controller (aka Home Assistant) discriminates between through which gateway the data is to flow by way of the different topic names.
If my "something like" is correct, then changing brokers is changing the IPaddress/URL in your gateways and in your controller (though if the controller is Home Assistant, it may be a bother because the device-id's may change which will make a mess of all the work you've done in HA. This is why I like @eiten 's solution.)
I hope it's all working for you again.
OSD
@OldSurferDude well, the ESP8266 is limited to 4 TCP clients in arduino IDE. This can't be really increased. I did som experiments and you can set it up to 15, but after the 5th client on my web server, I got a freeze.
Maybe you got something wrong. #define MY_GATEWAY_MAX_CLIENTS 2 defines how many controllers (eg Home Assistant) can connect to the gateway, not how many sensors/MySensors devices.
And yes, you can have multiple TCP gateways in HomeAssistant. I got an NRF24, an RFM95 long range and a RFM95 short range gateway (all based on ESP32) on the same Home Assistant.
Regards, Edi
Just for completeness: the right way to do this is to add the json under ~/.platformio/boards and the other files as described in https://community.platformio.org/t/how-use-a-same-chip-but-with-different-environment/18082/4