Hi,
Has anyone used any Bluetooth 5 dongles… maybe like this: https://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/nordic-semiconductor-asa/NRF52840-DONGLE/1490-1073-ND/9491124
With either the Raspberry PI or Intel NUC?
I want to try and get rid of some of my Raspberry PI’s that I run due to the range limitations with Bluetooth 4.
Ideally, I would want Bluetooth 5 on my Intel NUC and then I could have just one Home assistant Instance in my network…
Why do you currently have more than one?
I use the miFlora sensors to monitor plants around the property. I have around 25 of them.
The rage on a single RPI does not reach all of the sensors using ble/Bluetooth 4. With the range of Bluetooth 5, I will be able to get rid of the relay HA nodes and all the sensors will be able to talk to my main HA over the extended range of Bluetooth 5.
I know that there are things like plant gateway etc, but I choose to run a full hassio instance on each RPI and then use rest api to get the data from my “satellite RPI” back to my intel NUC which is my main instance.
Sorry, just to add… the Hassio build for NUC (based on RESIN OS) does not support bluetooth either, so hence me using aditional RPI’s to get BLE data…
I run Hassio on a NUC (in Docker), but Bluetooth is running just fine
I have just upgraded from resin to hassos and bluetooth is indeed working on nuc, but coverage is still an issue. Bluetooth 5 hopefully would address the coverage issue…
This is of interest to me as well, but in order to get good coverage wouldn’t both your USB stick and sensors need to support Bluetooth 5?
Also, have you tried a Class-1 Bluetooth stick?
5 will be backwards compatible, just like you can use your old bluetooth 3 devices with bluetooth 4. So i was hoping to get a 5 stick and then be able to read my 3/4 sensors…
It will definitely read them and they will work at least as well as they do now, but I assume it’s like WiFi, to get all the features (range, in your case) both the client and the access point need to be running the new standard, no?
good point… dunno…
For me the holy grail will be the newer Bluetooth 5.1 which will allow determining the position of Bluetooth devices up until the centimeter. This would mean very accurate occupation tracking throughout the house.
I was led by a search with “nrf52840” query.
I’m not sure that the question is still relevant, but I’ll answer just in case:
the only solution that I managed to find in order to make this dongle a USB-BT controller is an usb_hci example from Zephyr RTOS. But this does not turn out to be a full-fledged controller, and there are bugs, and it is not stable.
I also have a non-Nordic nrf52840 dongle with Adafruit bootloader - I did not succeed in flashing Zephyr on it, I need a J-Link probe. In any case, it will be difficult for an ordinary user to make this kind of dongles work as a USB-BT controller.
Just in case, I’ll mention another solution to increase the BT coverage area - ESPHome on ESP32 device that can be connected to HA host via MQTT or NativeAPI.
Sorry for bad English.
P.S. There is also a custom component that I support, which can help slightly “expand” the BT coverage area, because it uses passive advertisements reception from Xiaomi sensors (including MiFlora), and does not establish a connection with the sensor, unlike the original component.