BLE device tracker help

ESPHome
1

I’m running HA on a rpi4 and using the built in bluetooth. Nothing else uses bluethooth. Ever sense moving to HA I’ve been looking for something to replace my smartthings arrival sensors. I got some Tiles to try this time and the integration for them is way to slow. So I added

  - platform: bluetooth_tracker
    new_device_defaults:
        track_new_devices: true
  - platform: bluetooth_le_tracker
    new_device_defaults:
        track_new_devices: true

to my configuration.yaml and everything started looking up. Got the file known_devices and after some searching I found the mac address for the tile. Everything has went down hill from there. Everything that it found got added to entities but I couldn’t do anything with them. In the process of trying to delete the unwanted enitities I deleted the tile form known_devices… oops. After hrs of trying to figure it out I deleted everything from configuration.yaml and deleted the known_devices file and did a reboot. Added everything back to configuration.yaml and reboot again and known.devices file did not show back up. Or any entities. At one point during the day I installed Passive BLE monitor but have sense deleted it. And got ahead of myself and installed ESPHome.

  1. Any idea on what I have done to keep bluetooth_le_tracker from working?

  2. Once it does start working again how do I make the tile usable once I figure out its mac address?

  3. How do I delete the unwanted entities so they don’t show up?

Eventually I would like to get some bluetooth extenders to increase the signal distance but that is for another day. Right now I’m just trying to get everything setup to test with.

I should of done a backup before starting this project but I forgot to. The only one I have is from 2 weeks ago when updating to core_2023.4.2 I have thought about doing a restore from it. Do you think this would fix what ever I missed up so I can start again???

2

Okay got it working again. Had to delete new_device_defaults: for each tracker. Know known_devices file shows back up and the tile is in it. Still working on 2 and 3

3

So the trick is reboot, reboot, reboot. Any time you make a change to device_tracker or known_devices reboot the system and close the web browser.

Now that I have everything working and figured out. If I add esphome devices to extend the bluetooth will I have to set everything back up and delete device_tracker so it doesn’t use the built in bluetooth?