Today, a ShellyBLU Button1 was delivered and after I put a battery into the device, it was discovered immediately by HA. After I finished the config, I got a new device with 2 entities:
battery
packet_id (deactivated)
signal level (deactivated)
After I activated the packet_id sensor, the sensor value increased most(!) times I pressed the button. But that doesn’t work always. Even when I’m standing right next to my Raspi, some button presses don’t change the sensor value.
I looked around for bthome/bluetooth events in the developer view and googled around (I expected to get these events because I’m used to it from the zigbee integration) but I couldn’t found anything.
Especially because the only sensor that seems to somehow react to button presses was deactivated: What is the correct way to use a bthome button as an automation trigger?
Nope, I checked that. There is just no Bluetooth or bt event. I even subscribed to all events, pressed the button several times and only got one or two state change events for the packet id sensor.
This is really strange, especially because shelly mentions the button’s compatibility with HA, but so far, its not really usable
Today’s release announcement for 2023.5 contained a sentence about the support for that device. So, I guess when I later update my HA version, the button will work as expected.
I’m using the RaspberryPI onboard bluetooth adapther and I haven’t tried the beacon mode. I don’t even know how to activate it
I was able to activate the beacon mode through the shelly BLE debug app,
but it needs updating it was good to test the location function,
but if you turn on beaconing every ‘beacon’ (8secs) turns on the button pushes too
Let me know how your battery looks like after some days. Because I activated one 7 days ago, the other one 8 days ago. One battery is empty, the orher one says 38%.
Unfortunately, something I also read on the Shelly Community Forum on Facebook.
Maybe the battery that has been the delivered with the button was just crap or half-empty. I know we expect a quality battery in it when its delivered, however I wonder what happens if you put a new “quality” battery into it.
I ordered two of the buttons today, only purpose will be for iBeacon / presence.
At least this is a iBeacon that can be purchased in Europe, unlike those Blue Charm iBeacons…
I’ve just tried it out with the next HA version. These automations have the same problem I described in my first post: only some presses trigger the automation.
2023.5 has added BTHome events, so you should be able to use the Shelly BLU button1 when creating automations. It should support 6 click types, single, double and tripple click, all for normal and long clicks. The button will not not have button entities, only events. Im currently working on an update that keeps the entities like battery available, also when not using it for some time. But that will also need a firmware upgrade.
and the entities are too empty too
