Here is my use case. I have a Bluetooth dongle running near my Home Assistant machine in the garage. I would like to use BLE to control my August locks, which are inside the house and behind several walls. So range is an issue.
Before I went down the Bluetooth Proxy route, I added my August locks with the Yale Bluetooth integration in HA. They came up as expected and could be controlled, but - as expected - the range was poor and and the connection would frequently drop.
So I bought and configured a single M5Stack device to act as a Bluetooth Proxy. Config seems to have gone ok - followed the instructions, no errors. The issue is that the proxy does not seem to be doing anything. Connection on my August locks is still super unstable and signal strength low.
Couple of questions:
Do I need a couple of proxy devices and not just one? I.e. one near my Bluetooth dongle and and another near my August locks? I understand the proxies relay Bluetooth data between themselves using WiFi and then throw off Bluetooth signals to devices in range is that right?
If I only need a single device, where do I place it - near the source (dongle) or destination (locks)?
From what I understand locks are not currently supported with the BLE proxy. I ended up getting a couple esp32 boards to help with mine and didn’t see any difference.
Curious what type of Bluetooth does your HA setup use?
So with the new 2022.10 release it looks like active BLE support has been implemented. I am still trying to figure out though whether I need multiple BLE proxy devices throughout the house to make the proxy concept work.
For example, my BLE dongle is in the garage, plugged into my HA server. I need to make my August locks work inside the house via BLE. Does this mean I need a BLE proxy device in the garage next to my dongle and another one (or possibly two) inside the house near the locks?
The way I understand the BLE proxy concept is that each proxy device retransmits BLE signals via WiFi, thus dramatically increasing BLE range. Am I correct here or way off?
The ESP based proxies use ESPHome to send and receive bluetooth data back and forth to Home Assistant. If you install one in your house, as long as it is on the same network that Home Assistant is on, or at least as long as Home Assistant knows how to connect to it - if you have some sort of special network - then it will work. You do not need to install one in the garage.
Hmm interesting. Well in that case I must be doing something wrong. After following instructions and commissioning the proxy into my setup, nothing has changed and the BLE connection to my August locks is still super flaky and unreliable.
Perhaps I need to wipe the ESPHome setup and start again.
Perhaps once the proxy is set up and known to be working - you might want to try removing the lock and re-adding it?
You also haven’t mentioned HOW you added the proxy stuff to your ESPHome?
ESPHome was updated AFTER Home Assistant, and the ACTIVE proxy stuff was included in that update, before that - the bluetooth proxy was passive only, it could only listen for data, but not make a connection to stuff.
Hey guys, does anyone know how to ‘publish’ the online/offline status of these bluetooth proxies in HA? Right now, I’ve got to go to the ESPHome addon dashboard to see if a device is online. Was wondering if that status could be transferred to HA within the integration (I guess I could scan the house wifi to see if it’s online, but I’d rather not do that).