Bluetooth Poxy ESP32 Synology Docker - No Devices Discovered

[MEAUTO]

Hello,

I have successfully flashed a ESP32 with Bluetooth Poxy and connected it to my WiFi. HA can see the ESP32 however no Bluetooth devices are discovered and shown in HA.
When I download ESP32 diagnostic log through HA, I can see that many Bluetooth devices are discovered (some without names) for example like below.

I am not sure what more step I am missing, my understanding is that I do not need DBus or BlueZ as I am using a proxy and not an Adapter, is this a correct assumption.

I would appreciate any help.

-------------- Discovered device ------------------

{
            "name": "Meghan speaker",
            "address": "6B:43:57:47:6B:4A",
            "rssi": -86,
            "advertisement_data": [
              "Meghan speaker",
              {},
              {
                "0000fea0-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb": {
                  "__type": "<class 'bytes'>",
                  "repr": "b'\\x03\\xfa\\x8f\\xca\\x97\\xfb\\ro   \\xbe\\xff'"
                }
              },
              [
                "0000fea0-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb"
              ],
              -127,
              -86,
              []
            ],
            "details": {
              "source": "24:DC:C3:43:C6:BC",
              "address_type": 1
 
{
            "name": null,
            "address": "46:28:B4:F6:31:8C",
            "rssi": -89,
            "advertisement_data": [
              null,
              {
                "76": {
                  "__type": "<class 'bytes'>",
                  "repr": "b'\\x10\\x069\\x1a\\x8dk\\x0cK'"
                }
              },
              {},
              [],
              12,
              -89,

[francisp (Francis)]

Do the discovered devices have a HA integration?

[MEAUTO]

Not sure what you mean, I added the iBeacon tracker integration, but still nothing. I am under impression that it will discover any Bluetooth devices that are sending advertisement packets. I have a few beacons which I can see on my phone. Perhaps if you give me more information I should be able to provide better answer. I am new to this BLE. Thank you for your help.

[MEAUTO]

Also I enabled logging for ESP32 and I can see the HA is actually log these activities but I am not sure how to see these? Are there other integrations for BL/BLE to add ?

When I try to add Bluetooth Integration, HA says:
No unconfigured Bluetooth adapters found. There are 0 ignored adapters

Here is the partial log:

Thanks

2024-10-10 23:16:00.209 DEBUG (MainThread) [aioesphomeapi.connection] esp32-bluetooth-proxy-43c6bc @ 192.168.10.116: Got message of type BluetoothLERawAdvertisementsResponse: advertisements {
  address: 211258927516067
  rssi: -84
  data: "\033\377u\000B\004\001\200n\300#\215T\211\243\302#\215T\211\242\001Fa\302w\000\000"
}

2024-10-10 23:16:00.209 DEBUG (MainThread) [aioesphomeapi.connection] esp32-bluetooth-proxy-43c6bc @ 192.168.10.116: Got message of type BluetoothLERawAdvertisementsResponse: advertisements {
  address: 124898945547804
  rssi: -96
  address_type: 1
  data: "\002\001\032\002\n\014\n\377L\000\020\005\n\030\000\253z"
}

[brooksben11 (Ben)]

@MEAUTO

When I try to add Bluetooth Integration, HA says:
No unconfigured Bluetooth adapters found. There are 0 ignored adapters

BT Proxies won’t show up there.

As @francisp mentioned, it will only work with things that have an integration. Do you have a specific device that works with a HA integration that you’re expecting to show up?

[MEAUTO]

As mentioned I have some Bluetooth trackers (generic) I am hopping to be able to see. I just found a [ESPHome BLE Gateway] integration which I am playing with, but it seems that I need need a BLE gateway (from the same author) as it doesn’t work with BT proxies. Personally I think it is mess to install so many layers just to see a BLE device in HA, it should have been much simpler and more efficient.

[brooksben11 (Ben)]

If your trackers don’t act as iBeacons (which has a HA integration), maybe you could use the Bermuda custom integration?

Bermuda - Bluetooth/BLE Room Presence and tracking [custom integration]

[icon] Howdy! Bermuda is a custom integration (available via HACS using custom repository) which takes the bluetooth advertisements from ESPHome bluetooth-proxy’s (or shelly devices) in HA, and allows you to track your devices by Area and Distance. Ultimately I plan to use it as a platform to experiment with trilateration / triangulation, locating devices based on relative signal strengths (like building a map of your home based on visible ble devices and their relative distances, solving for…

I THINK it lets you track pretty much anything the proxies pick up.

[MEAUTO]

I booted the ESP32 proxy and now Bermuda is discovering devices, mostly Random MAC and some with Bermuda Prefix and some without !

Thank you for your tip Ben.

[tekno-yanqui]

My experience is that if the HA instance doesn’t see a local Bluetooth adapter, you can’t use Bluetooth proxies either. My HA is installed on an openwrt that isn’t detecting the built-in Bluetooth.

I got a USB-BT500 from Asus. I don’t know why I settled on rtl8761bu but here we are. I have to say I was skeptical about just installing the firmware. But it worked. Or it’s in some weird netherworld of working. hciconfig detects the device. I can scan from the command line and it’s as though it was functional. But when I go into /dev there is no HCIx device. Anyway, HA saw it enough to detect an active Bluetooth adapter and suggests a -v command for making it available to my docker container. I did that and it made no difference. At least the Bluetooth half-detection is sufficient to survive a reboot My theory is it’s colliding with the OS’ detection of an onboard Bluetooth device and not managing to use it.

I’m a little bummed it isn’t working directly but it was like hitting one of the mushrooms in Super Mario - I leveled up and all of a sudden HA started detecting Bluetooth proxies. It saw my Shelly device first, then I setup my Everything Presence sensors to proxy and it detected each of those as they came back online with that option set in their config. Eventually the emmc in the little rockchip device running HA will fail and I’ll move the Bluetooth to its successor - it’ll eventually get used directly instead of as a magic talisman that unlocked proxy detection.

I had expected to see the Shelly BT proxy show up a week ago when I re-did that switch, but it wasn’t usable in HA until the local BT adapter loaded firmware.