Can Voice PE act as a bluetooth proxy?

opb · December 28, 2024, 12:18pm

As per the title really - I don’t have any other ESP32 devices with ESPHome running in the area where my Voice PE is now living. It would be great if it could act as a Bluetooth proxy for the bluetooth temp/humidity sensors I have in the same area.

Does anyone know if this can be done? I’m assuming that adopting into my HA’s ESPHome install wouldn’t be the best idea, as that’s not how it’s done OOTB.

Cheers

alex3m3ti8 · December 28, 2024, 1:45pm

Short answer is no.

I have been tinkering with mine and it looks like the hardware for it is there. According to the config, the chip inside is the esp32s3 which has WiFi and Bluetooth 5. The factory firmware does have Improv BLE (for initial provisioning) but not BLE proxy enabled (which means if you want to enable it, you’d have to flash your own config),

BUT ESPHome has always stated that running the voice assistant and BLE proxy simultaneously can be problematic.

Furthermore, in the factory configuration, voice assistant doesn’t start if BLE is enabled which means to run Voice Assistant, you would have to modify this as well.

github.com

esphome/home-assistant-voice-pe/blob/e5f5c59875d14338374c52d067e38a649df8ac93/home-assistant-voice.factory.yaml#L9


      
          packages:
            # This is an inline package to prefix the on_client_connected with the wait_until action
            # It must appear before the actual package so it becomes the orignal config and the
            # on_client_connected list from the package config is appended onto this one.
            va_connected_wait_for_ble:
              voice_assistant:
                on_client_connected:
                  - wait_until:
                      not: ble.enabled
                  - delay: 2s
              wifi:
                on_disconnect:
                  - ble.enable:
            home-assistant-voice: !include home-assistant-voice.yaml
          
          esphome:
            project:
              name: Nabu Casa.Home Assistant Voice PE
              version: dev

Overall, I think the cards are stacked against this at least for now.

opb · December 28, 2024, 4:04pm

Thanks for the reply. Good to hear I wasn’t just missing something. I definitely wouldn’t want the BLE functionality at the expense of the Voice PE being able to do its primary function!