Connect Xiaomi smartwatch to check who's home

Hi, me and my wife both have Xiaomi smart watches (a Redmi Watch Active 3 and a Miband 3) and I would like to use them as additional sensor to check if someone is home. I cannot find a addon/plugin to integrate those tho. Someone have any idea if it’s possible?

Kindly,

There is new xiaomi integration so you could check that first.
I added my smart watch using mobile app integration.

The Notify for Xiaomi & Mi Fitness app has a Home Assistant integration.

This would work with your Redmi Watch Active 3. For your wife’s Miband 3 she can use Notify for Mi Band – Apps on Google Play

If either of the watches can install the ZeppOS Home Assistant app then it can sync info: Home Assistant companion for Zepp OS devices - Share your Projects! - Home Assistant Community

The Passive BLE Monitor component supports some Xiaomi smartwatches: GitHub - custom-components/ble_monitor: BLE monitor for passive BLE sensors

Lastly using ESPHome presence detection might work: ESPHome BLE tracking Mi Band 4 - Working

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I just discovered another integration that works, Theengs Gateway: Install | Theengs Gateway: BLE to MQTT bridge My wife has Miband 8 and Theengs loaded up a device_tracker

And this is what I get using BLE monitor
image

You could likely use the rssi or when a value was last updated to detect home presence. Although you’d need full house Bluetooth coverage for it to work correctly.

And if you’re curious, this is what the Notify app adds to HA

Hmm do you need to change an app setting for it to broadcast the ble heart rate data?

Or does the band need to be connected to your phone?

Annoying you can’t turn on “discovery mode” with newer mi bands which makes them broadcast ble continuously and makes the older ones great beacons for presence detection.

Newer models only broadcast when not connected to your phone from what I can tell (and you need it connected to your phone to get notifications).

But maybe I’m missing something or things have changed.

I believe it depends on the band as to how it broadcasts the ble heart rate. The newer ones seem to make it harder. If you connect it to your phone then you do get the most info out of it via apps such as Notify. I think overall these newer ones don’t make great presence detectors.

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Thanks for the reply, I’m trying notify but doesn’t seems to work for what I need because the “watch connected/disconnected” sensors simply doesn’t update. All the rest of the sensors update correctly so it’s still useful but I cannot use it to double check if I’m home

Our Theengs Gateway (HA Add-on) will auto-discover the MiBand 3 as a BLE device tracker with Home/Away status, as @BenAndo noted above. It should also be possible to easily add the Redmi Watch Active 3 to be recognised by Theengs Gateway, if anyone with this device is willing to provide some raw BLE samples.

Screenshot 2025-01-19 at 00.35.33

The Theengs Gateway (Add-on) range can be extended with one or more ESP32s with the esp32dev-ble-mqtt-undecoded binary of OpenMQTTGateway installed. As long as they are all connected to the same MQTT Broker they assure BLE reception for even the larges mansion or property :wink: