I’ve created a couple of Bluetooth proxies, using an M5Stack Atom Lite and the handy “Ready Made Projects” page provided by ESPHome. They work just fine and show up properly as an ESPHome integration. But they don’t show up in the ESPHome sidebar dashboard on Home Assistant. (Running the ESPHome add-on Ver. 2024.4.1)
I have other BT proxies that run on other hardware that show up just fine, but both of the ATom Lite ones do not. The big difference here being that the other devices were built the “normal” way by creating a YAML config file, compiling, and uploading versus the Atom Lite versions which were flashed via the ESPHome site.
Normally, I’d just chalk this up to a minor cosmetic issue, but I can’t see any easy means to OTA update these Atom Lite devices in the future.
So, does any one know how to make them appear in the sidebar dashboard or, failing that, a way to wirelessly update these devices?
There are no YAML files that I can see. The Ready Made Project site appears to just compile and flash the devices directly.
I guess I could pull the corresponding files off their Git site, hope that they are up to date, edit them to match my naming / network config and just create new devices in ESPHome. Maybe.
Kinda defeats the whole point of having pre-made config if there’s no OTA path for the original firmware though.
For sure, the ESPHome integration “adopts” the device upon discovery, but the device still does not appear in the sidebar.
From what I can tell, if there is no YAML config for the device in the config/esphome/ directory, it will not appear in the sidebar. Somewhat analogous to a project in an IDE I guess.
Just for yucks, I went through the steps and I have verified that you need to build these from the YAML source, just like any other ESPHome device for OTA updates to work.
So again, these pre-built projects are all well and good, but there’s no clear mechanism to update them OTA once they are built. So you trade off flexibility and future updates against “click and done” convenience. Something to keep in mind.
Yeah I just don’t get that. I thought that the whole idea of adopting a ready made device is that it makes it available in your esphome dashboard. I guess that if it hasn’t, that’s a bug you should report.