I have some BLE receivers in the house - enough to cover every room and most of the garden. I have been using ESPresense for a few years, but now I have tried with Bermuda and I am getting the same problem that I’ve had for a while now: The BLE device goes offline/away at seemingly random times and for a random amount of time. Which makes my outdoor lights go haywire since they think one of us just came within range of the house when it’s dark. My wife and I both have the companion app on our phones, and we have the same problem.
I used to have BLE beacon from an app called Beacon Scope, but the Android power management om my OnePlus 15 and my wife’s OnePlus 12 made that stop working when the phone was off about a year or so ago.
Is there anything I can do to make the companion app keep sending the beacon without those problems, or maybe another app that works without these problems? I suspect it’s still Android’s damned obsession with power usage that is to blame, even if I have set the Companion App to “no limts for background activities”, and the power mode for the phones to “high performance mode”, which at the moment has an expected battery time of 20 hours and 25 minutes, while “super power saving mode” has an expected battery time of 24 hours and 43 minutes! Idiotic even to suggest that, in my opinion.
No, I have set it up in the Companion App with BLE Transmitter (under Sensors/Bluetooth sensors) with set UUID’s. I didn’t want to complicate things in my first post by mentioning that, but I have key sensors with BLE beacons as well as I use. They are not set as “away” unless they are actually out of the house.
Edit: I have been working with IT for close to 40 years, and I find the way of getting the IRK for Android phones far too messy. I much prefer to use my own set of UUID’s and put them into an app, like the Companion App. That’s after all what that settings is there for.
Yes but you are tracking your phones. Your phones have a privacy feature to stop businesses like supermarkets tracking which aisle you are in. The only way to use ble tracking of your phone is to set up the integration I listed above.
It works extremely well to determine if your phone is in range of a ble proxy. I use it with ESPHome proxys and Bermuda and my phones are only set as away when they are out of range.
Yep, that’s the one I’m using. I don’t really move where there is big business tracking, Norwegian rules are very strict in that respect and I live in a small town. Also the UUID I’m using is not attributable to anything else than the companion app, it has nothing to do with the MAC or anything else of the phone. I will set aside an hour to make an attempt to set up that Private BLE beacon for my own phone, though. Maybe that will fix my problems. If it does I’ll do the same with my wife’s phone.
Nope, that didn’t work. I am pretty sure I followed the instructions as they were written, and I tried four times. I had Bluetooth HCI snoop-log on, I unpaired a BT speaker, turned BT on and off again and re-paired. The adb command adb bugreport scanwatch chewed rather slowly through the percents , and the zip file was downloaded, but there was no FS\data\misc\bluetooth\logs\btsnoop_hci.log in the zip file. I found a directory with today’s date and the time I did the pair/repair called BT_HCI_2026_0809_151542.cfa buried behind it, but that’s obviously not it, because I opened it and got this from Wireshark:
The last time I did the ADB with the BT turned off, but that gave a file with a different name, bugreport-(redacted - probably ID on the phone)-BP2A.250605.015-2026-08-09-15-21-20.zip
Any idea why this is not working?
Edit: This is with the latest version of adb, downloaded today.
Edit 2: Tried with my wife’s phone, same result. I’m going to open a new thread on this, the problem isn’t related to the Companion App.
Didn’t help, unfortunately. It still disconnects at seemingly random times. Weird thing is that it doesn’t disconnect at the same time as the old ESPresense beacon disconnects. Maybe I can use both and create a combined sensor as a helper?
Anyway I think this must be an Android/OnePlus problem, with this damned reidiculous, obsession with power saving. I found this thread that mentions that setting up the Companion App as a BLE beacon keeps it alive, but I have no idea if it still works for them, because they haven’t been on the forum lately, so I assume there’s no point in asking. It’s not working100 % for me, and anything that’s working 95 % will invariably be “this stuff of yours never works” from the wife.
Edit: I found out that I can attribute several device trackers to one person and then use the person coming home as the trigger/condition for the automations, instead of a single device tracker. That may help, we’ll see in a few days.
The companion app provides a stable UUID you can track outside of the phones default. This is how I track mine. Companion app, sensors, bluetooth, BLE transmitter. Your stable BLE UUID Is at the bottom of the page.
I’ve also been seeing weirdness in Bermuda. Dropping enough trackers so I loose my trilateration. I just have t had time to chase it yet.
Edit: and you will ABSOLUTELY want confirming trackers., the new template device tracker can even let you make one really complex virtual device tracker if you want.
Sounds interesting! I may need to check that template device tracker. But I thought I could do it easier, by attributing the trackers from ESPresense (Companion App UUID) and Private BLE Device Tracker to the persons, and then use the person’s change from away to home as a condition. I ran up against a problem, though. This is the code I have been using just for the Companion App tracker:
