Hi all!
Hoping you can share your expertise. I’m having difficulty setting up my Bermuda. I have two ESP32s flashed with ESPHome, I have everything configured in home assistant. I am using my android phone (Xiaomi 13) as a beacon, with the Home Assistant App transmitting signal.
In the Bermuda Device for my phone, the Distance entity seems to be somewhat accurate and updates relatively quickly. The Area entity tends to only read “Unknown”. If i put my phone right up to either ESP32 board, it seems to accurately update the Area, but shortly after removed more than ~50cm away it seems to go to Unknown again (even though the distance is updated accurately for a few meters).
Any idea why the distance is accurately reported but it can’t seem to identify the Area? I’ve tried fiddling with a range of Configurations but nothing seems to change this
Yeah might be helpful to show a single value instead (or something that tells me I’m doing it right) when I was calibrating I didn’t fully understand the signals and why some were way off.
From what you’re describing - that the area works within 50cm but not beyond that, would imply that maybe you’ve set your “max radius” setting to 0.5m.
If that doesn’t solve it, can you take some screenshots of the Bermuda config page, and of the device page showing the problem occurring and not occurring?
The phone basically needs to be touching register the right area.
I’ve tried a variety of Max Radius configurations from 1m - 1000m and none seemed to be helpful and I keep getting an Unknown reads even a meter away from the ESP
It’s driving me nuts and I hope this can be resolved otherwise unusable
I’ve got everything setup and working, the only problem is I can’t get areas to return from the bermuda entity. When I use the entity in visibility to have a section of my dashboard appear based on the room I’m currently in the only options that show up for all bermuda entities, including sensors, only show home / away / unavailable / unknown.
Does anyone know how you go about having the entity return the current area?
hello
i want to migrate from espresense to bermuda.
and i have a question.
Its posible to change the firmware of the espresense remotely from espresense to bermuda??
some of my espresense are in a not easy accesible area, and i dont know if i can flash esphome with bluetooth proxy remotely and not need to conect phisically to a pc for flashing
Do you have all of your proxies assigned to areas? That’s the only way I can think of that might cause the area to be unknown while still showing a distance. It’s not something I recall seeing before.
If that doesn’t solve it, can you do a “Download Diagnostics” from Bermuda, preferably after moving your phone close enough to register an area, then moving it away so it goes “unknown” (and take the diags within 5 seconds or so, if possible). Please do a “reload” before starting, so that you don’t get a big slow-down in HA when creating the diags.
Another thing to check, but I don’t know if it will help, is to see what power level your HA companion app on your phone is using to transmit the beacon. It may not be the problem though, since you are still getting a distance measurement.
Yes. It means those proxies have not recently received any signal from that device - which is quite normal and expected, as Bluetooth only has limited range.
I think you’ll need to describe more accurately what you are trying to do, and what is happening. If the dashboard thing is expecting a “device tracker” entity, then yes, it can only support home/away. Are you using a particular guide for setting this up?
Device tracker entities only support home/away/zones - not areas. The area sensor is what you need to use to track areas.
I don’t know. It might be possible, depending on what espresense accepts for OTA firmware files. However there are some ESPHome changes to how the internal flash is laid out that were implemented a year or so ago, which makes a big difference to how reliable the bluetooth proxy setup is. OTA updates typically can’t apply those changes, so even if you can flash it remotely you might find the results to be not very reliable.
My recommendation would be to try things out with one or two devices that are easy to access, and make a decision from there - but I would probably plan for having to pull them out and do a reflash via USB-serial for the best odds in getting a good result.
