Bluetooth confusion

1

Hello, I am deeply confused on everything in regards to bluetooth.

I have HA installed on Rasperry Pi4 and when Bluetooth was introduced in the updates it show this device:
image
That I guess it’s the integrated BT of the Raspberry Pi4.
I saw several vides regarding HA BT feature and they show that HA will pop-up all BT devices discovered, but I do not get anyone even if I have several BT devices around.

Going here and there in the vaious docs and topics I tried to add stuff to my configuration.yaml file:
image
To be honest I don’t even unserstand if I really need to add those things into the config or not.

BTW, some time ago I bought 9 ESP32 boards and I flashed 8 of those with ESPresense and distributed those in the rooms of my house, installed MQTT broker and enabled BT in the companion app of my mobile phone.
This works, I can see all ESP32 devices in MQTT:
image

And I can track my position in the house:
image
(“Sala” is the living room)

But I am very unhappy with the accuracy of tracking, it works only if my mobile phone is really next to the ESP32, if it is even 1 meter of distance, it will not detect my position. I play a lot with absorbtion, max distance, etc… settings but nothing changed at all.

With the new release of HA 2022.10.1 I installed my last ESP32 as BT Proxy with ESPHome following the instruction in the annoncument:
image

and added to it’s config the following:

image
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ESP32 BT Proxy show in HA:
image

iBeacon Tracker also appear now in my devices and after a while it detected 5 iBeacons:
image
4 of those are referred to my mobile phone iBeacon, and the last one is my daughter’s phone:
image

I don’t unserstand why I have 4 beacons for one mobile phone.

Said that, I still do not understand at all this stuff with BT and iBeacons. None of my BT devices are detected in HA (Like Stereo, BT speakers, etc…) but for now this is a minor problem to me, what I would like to achieve is to track my room presence with my mobile phone BT.
I don’t understand if with those new features in HA I should get rid of all my ESP32 flashed with ESPresense end flash those with ESPHome like I did with one following the instructions in the announcement.
I don’t unserstand what’s next step after I have my ESPHome flashed ESP32 to start tracking my mobile phone.

Sorry for the long and confused topic, I appreciate any guidance to understand all this.

:slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Hey, Can i ask. How did you determine the iBeacons are from your phone? I can’t find the UUID for my phone.

3

Hi Jamie, from your mobile phone open HA app, go in Settings - Companion app - Sensors - Manage sensors - then look for BLE Transmitter, enable it and then you will see down there the beaon ID.
Menu names could be a little different, I have the Italian translation.

1 Like
4

Maybe you have to reload the bluetooth integration to work it fine…

That I need to do an automation with a script… because a problem since 2022.8 the Switchbot bot doesn’t work without reload the bluetooth integration in my RPI4, …so I have to reload manually or have to do with a shell command to reload before I want to use them… However I don’t know the config entry id of this bluetooth integration…

Do you know the bluetooth id integration?

Thanks in advance

5

I might have done a little step forward, one of my 5 phone’s iBeacon detected the distance, I added the entity to my dashboard and also the distance:
image

Now my new doubts are:

  • How can I have the entity communicating the room name instead of the generic “At Home” (In casa) ?
  • How can I calibrate the ESP32 with ESPHome distance? In the screenshot above it is showin 23 meters as distance but my phone was like 3 meters from the ESP32.
1 Like
6

Same problem bere… why same mobile create various UUID like:

0b64feXXa-fbe4-4XX5-a5a4-c05XXXXXf079_100_1 13F4
0b64feXXa-fbe4-4XX5-a5a4-c05XXXXXf079_100_1 418B
…

is it possible to group?

EDIT: review Duplicate devices in iBeacon Tracker · Issue #80128 · home-assistant/core · GitHub