I have a a few Aruba AP’s around my house and they support BLE Asset Tracking, a feature I have never used. After loosing my smart watch a few times I decided to look into using it to see if I could track my watch location but I am at a loss on where to start.
Most Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy integrations with Home Assistant work around a bluetooth device being directly connected to HASS but in my situation each AP can forward the information to an RTLS server, an analytics & location engine, some form of Beacon server or BLE Asset Tag Mgmt Server (WS or HTTPS). I am looking for an open source solution to resolve this but then there is the issue of passing this info onto home assistant to be useful.
Has anyone any experience with network connected BLE discovery?
I’d suggest first enabling it and seeing how it works with the aruba software, how quick it is to update vs wifi presence. You may not be able to control how often the blue tooth updates.
I briefly had an unsupported router and I was able, through node red, listen to the log output with a udp node. After that it was just a matter of filtering for my mac and connection status.
303H. I have an oddly layed out house and there are 700mm thick stone walls so needed many APs to get coverage. Got these from a place that was getting rid of them and they do the job.
So I took a look at your ap settings, there is an option to export the syslog. There is a dedicated syslog node in nodered, if that doesnt work I believe I used a udp node. Connect it to a debug node and you should get the log output.
Chapter 33 -->Monitoring Devices and Logs -->Configuring a Syslog Server
I doubt there is much documentation. What Aruba OS version are you running?
This is from the data sheet
IOT PLATFORM CAPABILITIES
The 303H Series provides integrated Bluetooth capabilities
to enable Meridian and IoT-based location services, asset
tracking, and mobile engagement services. For expanded
use cases, an IoT expansion radio can be added to support
the Zigbee protocol. These features allow organizations to
leverage the AP as an IoT platform, which eliminates the need
for an overlay infrastructure and additional IT resources.
With that link I was able to find the older versions of the api and their details. The newer versions required a login. There is a presence api, I did not see anything specific to bluetooth.
The presence api supplies the connected access point. I assume the existing integration uses this api. I dont have an aruba ap only providing guidance to the op.
Does the existing integration not supply the ap? If one of you could check under dev tools, look for the device tracker it creates and in the attributes is the a mac or ap name?
I just picked up 2 IAP-335’s and an Outdoor IAP-275 new for cheap and would love to see if there is a better integration than what is natively supported. I only say this because it requires you to enable telnet on the switches and that is just bad security practices. I’ve also tried to find where this add-on Zigbee radio is for the 330 series but haven’t been able to find them anywhere. But it would be nice even if they just act in repeater mode. Does anyone know of a third-party ZigBee USB stick that will work with these? I have a Nortek HUBZ1 and would pick up more if they are supported. Either way im interested too if anyone want to give it a try
I also have aruba APs (model AP 555) with builtin BLE and Zigbee
They act as ZC (Zigbee coordinator)
Does anyone know to set up the communication to home assistant ?
I found this : Transport Profile
Would this allow to set it up for ZHA ?
FYI my employer is an Aruba customer. My understanding is the have not designed that as a generic Zigbee coordinator. The first use cast I saw mentioned was for use with Assa Abloy Zigbee door locks in a hotel setting using the Assa Abloy software to manage them. After we get more 500 Series deployed I want to research using similar locks with their plugin for our management system to replace battery hungry Wi-Fi door locks.
would you know how to do that ?