Will those commands actually run from hassio? Sorry for a noob question but I thought those wouldn’t work unless you were running linux and a VM on there.
I’m using Windows 10 with Oracle VirtualBox with the VMDK image for hassio.
ok disregard , i did not realize you were running hass.os not hass.io
i am not familiar with this but i am downloading and will load it up and take a look
Ok, from what i have read so far the setup that you are using is really limited and striped down. It is geared towards simple stuff and getting started. there is no underlying os so the commands will not work.
I recommend you set aside about an hour and follow this video to the letter and at the end you will have a system that will be able to grow and do things as you learn. Outside that i really do not have any interest in trying to setup hassos . i tried to spin it up in virtual box and immediately ran into problems. I really think if you will follow the video it will open up a whole new world for you. And make it a lot easier to get help.
Good Luck
Buy the way the video is walking you through installing fresh ubuntu server and HASS.IO in Virtual Box running in a docker container. Works really well . I have ran it for about a year now and this is the video i started from, i knew nothing about home assistant or linux at the time.
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Sounds great, I’ll check this out. Thank you again!
no problem good luck
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You sir are great! Thank you very much. This was super simple to setup and get configured.
I’m now seeing the bluetooth polling in the normal start window and guess what… it’s finding the MiFlora sensors and reporting in perfectly now! 
Thanks again for all your help and guidance! I think running Hassio this way is going to be much better going forward!
Awsome! Glad I could help. You will have a ball with that system because most anything you can do in full blown home assistant you can do there as you learn(which is where the real power is) and you also have the addon store full of plug and play plugins that you can just install without ever touching yaml files thanks to HASS.IO and guys like Frenk who makes a large portion of the add ons.ENJOY and have a great weekend. I am ordering some of those sensors for my wife’s garden looks a lot easier than what i had planned.
If you haven’t done i highly recommend you do a snapshot now so that if you mess something up exploring its easy to get back to a working system. I would also clone the vm and store it off the system on a flash drive or other media.
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so did it actually find and use your onboard bluetooth or did you use a dongle.
On board bluetooth, no dongle. I cancelled the order for one. It looks like it’s being a little finicky activating sometimes when I reboot the VM though… bringing one device up and the other showing as ‘unknown’.
Going to have to poke around and see why that is. It brought them both us immediately once I got it up and running though.
You said you got it to work and then it stopped working for both and then for either one and you went with the bluetooth dongle and it’s been perfect since?
Yes i gave up on the on board bluetooth because i tried it on 3 different physical machines with win 7 and win 10. win10 never worked win7 was the one that it found then lost. I think it is a windows thing not wanting to share the bluetooth stack. But who knows. Another drawback for me was that if virtual box had the bluetooth then windows couldn’t connect to any devices . Also it does take ha quite some time to really get stable scanning on my system about 3-5 min . it could be that you have one of the sensors near some interference like microwave cordless phone wifi anything on the 2.4 ghz range will mess with bluetooth. microwave ovens really wreak havoc. other bluetooth devices will stomp on weaker signals like sensors as well so maybe switch places with the better reporting sensor with the lesser one and see if the problem follows?
I am currently installing hassio on a galaxy s6 plus for remote tracking its very interesting and has tons of potential. Have fun !!
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looking at sensor readings looks like you definitely have them in pretty different locations. lux and temp is quite different
Thank you for a highly informative series of posts!
I managed to get the ASUS BT400 USB dongle working using your instructions, it already runs and recognizes things as a device tracker, can’t wait to get back home and set up presence recognition with my phone
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Your welcome and glad we could help. Just a pointer with pd , through trial and error I have found that the best settings for quickest detection seems to be 3 seconds scan interval and 30 sec consider home with my setup.This settings does cause some erratic lock toggling sometimes if my wife is at the edge of the bt signal in the kitchen but if I use the recommended settings on the forums off increasing the consider home time to 5 min or more it seems to effect the discovery time when I approach my front door and doesn’t unlock before I reach it. Again just a suggestion on what works best for me, your milage may vary. 
PS.
Please post your findings with your dongle and settings here so that others can benefit from our testing.
Presence detection is a very time consuming, environment dependant and overall challenging part of home automation that to my knowledge has no one way that works for everyone but desperately needs one.
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That’s awesome really glad it all worked out for you!
FYI , I found in my environment, that i get the best range and most reliable response with a usb ext cable connected to pc and dongle in other end so that i can place the dongle at a height of approx 3 ft from floor , anything lower or higher than that and signal decreases due to a matrix of wireless 2.4 ghz signals all over my house. of course you may not need this but if you do , it’s a lot easier than trying to teeter your device at the right angle and draping ten extension cords together to get the dongle in that sweet spot where you can have your door unlock just as you reach for the knob. and dang does that impress when it happens .lol
What I discovered was that purely by using my phone I had dark spots in my apartment…it is however true that I don’t use an extension cord for my BT adapter, which shares an area with the Conbee stick (so also 2.4 GHz) and my WiFi router.
I ordered some Tiles and will report how they work. At the moment I don’t have a smart lock, so it wouldn’t be a major problem if it says I’m home a few seconds before I actually reach the door, but do plan on getting one in the future and you’re right that it would be awesome to trigger at just the right moment 
So, here’s my experience so far with the Tiles:
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I ended up not using (and uninstalling) the Bluetooth component in HA, the Tiles are BLE so I used the Bluetooth LE Tracker component (the official one)
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I set the scan interval to 3 seconds as you mentioned above and get recognized as Home as soon as I turn the keys in the lock (and not before), so yay!
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Away is being set 3 minutes after having exited the house (or 3 minutes after removing the Tile battery when I was testing)…I wonder if there is any way to configure this, although the current time might actually be OK, covering taking the trash out without marking me Away
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My devices list got spammed with about 220ish BLE devices during the night, which, unless you have some idea regarding it, might require manual deletion from known_devices.yaml when I usually take my VM snapshots…not a huge deal since CPU, disk & RAM usage is steady even with all this scanning
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Speaking of CPU usage, I’m running HA on an old i5 machine, so CPU load is 5% even after installing the BLE component, I had heard the Pi gets pretty hammered by that component
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I was not able to keep my keys in the door lock (or very near the door) when home, since it triggers Away mode after a few mins (I guess it’s just far enough away from my server for BT to be spotty), however if I come in and leave them on a desk that is a bit better positioned, detection is impeccable (no Away notifications all night)
Overall very pleased so far, a bit more testing is required before adding my gf’s Tile to the system and using them in automations, but I seem to have found their “sweet spots” and if detection remains as reliable as it has been in the past 12 hours, it would be perfect
And yeah, after having tried GPS, WiFi, phone Bluetooth and combinations of these 3 for presence detection, unless things go horribly wrong in the next few days I highly recommend Tiles or any other BLE tracker that is likely to be kept in one place in the home…I have a BLE watch as well, but as opposed to the Tile, I do move around with it when at home, so it might not be optimal.
I had some oddities with the box. I ended up having the issues where it wouldn’t detect or properly use the bluetooth on the host Windows 10 desktop.
Since then I purchased the bluetooth dongle noted earlier in the post. It would connect to hassio fine every time but if I put the bluetooth tracker in the configuration.yaml file, the UI would never come up.
The device would boot and I could SSH or get to my //shares on the device to view things such as logs, config/yaml files just fine and then comment out the bluetooth tracker and sudo reboot now and it would come back up and the UI would work fine.
I’m kind of stumped as to why the UI won’t come up when I enable bluetooth trackers now though.
I tried removing any previously known devices in case maybe that was causing some hiccup in the UI.
Any suggestions as to why the UI wouldn’t come up and just show ‘reconnecting’ forever when I enable bluetooth trackers now?
Scratch my previous post. I was being an idiot and using the bluetooth_tracker which was completely unnecessary.
Since I removed that and added in my mac addresses in the sensors.yaml file (without ’ ’ around the MAC address) it has been working flawlessly.
Great information!!! Just to be clear, are you using the Tile Component for detection or the Bluetooth le Component? The reason i ask is that i never could get the Bluetooth le component to work for me. It always gave errors in the log and would not find any of the le devices so i gave up. If you are using the Bluetooth le tracker component, are you using the same Hassio installation method that i recommended earlier? If not which method are you using? I would really like to get Bluetooth le working because i have ran into a distance issue with regular Bluetooth and le usually has a much longer detection range .Thanks for the information!!
what did you do in order to resolve the issue ?