Hello all. Not sure this it best place to ask, please forgive me if it’s not. I have a device that is bluetooth only that I can connect it to my iphone to control it. I would like to connect it to Hassio and control it from there. Would someone be kind enough to point me it a direction to start working on this please? ESP32 or some other type of device to get it into HA? Thanks for your help.
if there is no native HA integration, you’ll need to create one or search for someone who made one and provides a way to connect to HA. This could be via MQTT for example
Thank you for your input. However, I was really wanting more information on how to do this.
Thanks again
Maybe you should start by sharing what brand and model device it is. Maybe even provide a URL to the manufacturers website so we know what your talking about.
Thank you for your input. Being fairly new to HA, I was thinking that it would not be that difficult to connect bluetooth device to HA. It works just OK with their app on my iPhone but could be a lot better.
The device is called an “ooler” and is sold by this company:
It seems that it is manufactured by Kryo, Inc and under the brand of Chilitechnology.
From my research, it looks like you were able to connect the devices with IFTTT until recently, the service was removed and no longer supported.
I have asked the company using their on-line support but have not heard anything back. I will post the answer if I receive one.
With things moving toward a smart home everywhere I find it curious that devices like these are not supported with some type of home automation.
to the untrained eye it does look easy. The reality is each device is different so there is no one size fits all when it comes to communicating with a Bluetooth device.
I’ve done a quick search for potential stuff on GitHub, where it’s most likely to be, and could not find anything at first glance.
With nothing existing, the only way to connect to HA would be for you to write your own integration I’m afraid
Hello and thanks for the reply. Yes it does look easy but not so much.
I was able to use a BT app on my iPhone and connect to the “ooler” and see the UUID’s. However, there is no human readable data there. I have also researched on how to create a BT setup with an mini controller. Still don’t know if I have the smarts to go down that road but might try anyway.
I finally received an email from the company which does not say much:
"Thanks for reaching out! I’m so sorry to report we don’t have this functionality right now, but we love that you have a cool idea for how we could make the OOLER app even better! I’m happy to share your idea with the product team for you.
In the meantime, please let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you."
Oh well, on with the research.
Dennis
Hello davis,
did you manage to reach any progress there. I have an ooler and looking for a way to integrate with home assistant
Hi. I have never been able to get anything to work. Been trying to understand the codes in the Ooler but so far not luck. Not being a programmer it is slow going.
I don’t see why the company can’t allow this as it sure would be nice.
Oh well, will post here if I ever come up with something.
Ooler uses a BLE connection which is fairly easy to reverse engineer.
I used nRF Connect on my iPhone to connect to my Ooler and get the UUIDs for the Ooler’s services and characteristics.
From there you can use an ESP32 and something like ESP32-BLE2MQTT to expose those characteristics to an MQTT broker.
I used a Homebridge plugin to read and write those MQTT characteristics via HomeKit. I am not super familiar with Home Assistant but I assume there is a way to publish and subscribe to MQTT topics.
Basically the characteristic UUIDs you’re looking for are:
7A2623FF-BD92-4C13-BE9F-7023AA4ECB85 for device power where a 0 is off and a 1 is on.
6AA46711-A29D-4F8A-88E2-044CA1FD03FF to set the temperature in Fahrenheit.
CAFE2421-D04C-458F-B1C0-253C6C97E8E8 for the fan speed level where 0 is silent, 1 is regular and 2 is boost.
e8ebded3-9dca-45c2-a2d8-ceffb901474d for getting the current temperature. On my Ooler this was reported in Celsius but on my wife’s Ooler this was reported in Fahrenheit. Not sure why there is a discrepancy.
2C988613-FE15-4067-85BC-8E59D5E0BTE3 for setting the Ooler display temperature units where 0 is Fahrenheit and 1 is Celsius.
923445F2-9438-4D81-98C9-904B69B94ECA for getting dew point measurements.
The only downside to this approach is that only one device can connect to the Ooler at a time so if the ESP32 is connected you can’t use the smartphone app to control the Ooler anymore. Anyway hope this helps and good luck getting your Ooler connected to Home Assistant.
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Would you mind sharing your config.json file. I want to make sure I’m configuring the characteristics correctly and would like a working one to compare against. Thanks.
Thank you so much for your response. This really helps point me in the right direction. I will try to get something to work and id so will post here.
Thanks again,
Dennis
I’m interested in this too, as the Ooler on-device scheduling has been quite buggy and I’d prefer to turn it on/off with the Google Assistant + HA. Have you been able to make progress on this?
ESPHome is another ESP firmware that supports BLE as well as a native HA integration. It might be easier to set up. I plan to try this out at some point.
In general, looks like any device with BLE and WiFi could be used as the bridge.
Was anyone able to make this work using their Raspberry Pi’s built in bluetooth?
Hi mate,
Were you able to get this working with ESPHome and a ESP32?
Not yet. I was hoping to get a sample config file from @samwelnella as I’d got stuck on that part. Never circled back to try it again.