Bluetooth dongle keeps failing on Home Assistant Yellow

Hardware
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1

I used to have Home Assistant running on a Virtual Machine that had a bluetooth dongle passed through to the home assistant VM, and never had any issues.

However, I’ve since migrated this VM to a Home Assistant Yellow and using the same dongle it will just randomly lose access to it, and any devices that rely on bluetooth no longer work. The only way to get it to work is unplug the dongle and replug it in, or reboot. Sometimes it might last week before it fails again, sometimes I’m lucky if it lasts a day.

Does any know why this might be happening or how to fix or workaround.

I tried adding a cronjob to reboot everyday at 1am, but the reboot command doesn’t seem to work via a cron job.

2

There is a whole heap of troubleshooting tips on the HA Bluetooth Integration page.

There is also a warning for Realtek RTL8761BU adapters and disconnect issues - but you don’t say if that is what yours is so not sure if relevant.

The usual first step is to use an extension cable - maybe try that first.

3

I’m using a TP-Link UB500. I’ll give the extension cable a try but didn’t need that when it was on a VM server, just plugged straight in the USB port on the motherboard.

4

I think the UB500 uses the RTL-8761B chipset, so that may be your problem right there…

5

More bad news - its’s actually listed as an unsupported adapter:

  • tp-link UB500 (RTL8761BU) - Frequent connection failures with active connections
6

Oh damn, I hadn’t considered certain bluetooth dongles wouldn’t work with Yellow.