Bluetooth LE tracker showing a huge number of devices, how can i recognize them?

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1

Hey guys,
I read around the forums that BT LE tracker has some issues.
I decided to try it anyway.

(Im on an Asus TBs with Hass.io)

I enabled the tracker and in two days, it has generated two Tile entries (which are ok i guess) but also over 90+ entries like this one:

ble_5a_84_7e_f5_54_21:
  hide_if_away: false
  icon:
  mac: BLE_5A:84:7E:F5:54:21
  name: ble 5a 84 7e f5 54 21
  picture:
  track: true

Looking up my phones’ BT Mac addresses, i cant find any match within the discovered devices.

Can anyone help me out on how to match the discovered mac addresses to my actual devices?
BTW, there is no chance i have ~90 devices around my HA, so i dont know what’s going on there.

Should i give up and just use BT tracker?

2

I think the issue might be that some phones change their mac address regularly and I assume it will then create a new entry everytime the mac changes as it uses the MAC as an identifier.

1 Like
3

In my android settings, i can find the “Bluetooth Address”, which matches none on the list.
Am i looking at it wrong?

4

Hmm, that’s strange. The address showing in bluetooth, is this a mac address? You may also check under WiFi settings there should be a mac address somewhere as well.

5

Yes, it’s on the same page as the Wifi but i dont get how the wifi mac is involved on the bt tracker?

6

Ah ok sorry for the confusion. I think they both use the same MAC address, I don’t think there are separate MAC addresses for bluetooth and WiFi. But I’m out of ideas on where these MAC address come from.
The entries it generated, do they have the same 6 digits in the beginning?

7

Nah, to my knowledge, the devices have a different mac for BT and Wifi, as it’s different “network cards”
No the entries generated were totally different with the BT mac of my phone… I can’t explain it.

8

Ah okey, didn’t know that.

I meant whether the different entries compared to the other entries have been have the same 6 digits in the beginning. This would be an indicator that the entries have been created by the same device.

9

Got ya, that’s why i said totally different :slight_smile:

10

Ah ok, I’m sorry I’m out of ideas :neutral_face:

11

If you have specific devices where you can determine the BLE Mac address, and it doesn’t change (like some phones), you can use the LE tracker for those. Personally, I found that for tracking phones, the std BT tracker works very well.

I would periodically go through the known_devices file and set the track option to false for devices I don’t care about.