ESP Bluetooth Proxy - Full ESP home install

ESPHome
1

Hi,

New to HA.

I have HA running on a NUC, and have added a bluetooth Proxy (M5 unit -ESP home) to use a Mopeka propane sensor. This works. I am having trouble understanding the ESP home. It looks like I don’t have the full ESP home installation running, and if I install it, the bluetooth Proxy stops working, and the new BT proxy doesnt’ connect. Not sure what I need to to.

My goal is to add another propane sensor, a Nee-vo unit, and access its bluetooth broadcasts of tank level, which I can see thru a bluetooth sniffing IOS app. What should I do to add a full ESP home install, or to gain access to the Nee-vo data via the existing bluetooth proxy?

Can someone point me in the right direction??

THX!

PS - I posted here but didn’t get any reply after a couple of days, so am making a new topic:

2

No one knows what you mean by “full install or not” when you dont provide any other information related to it. A screen shot? A link or something that shows what youve installed? We dont read minds so if you dont give us any clues or information then hell, I dont know if you installed esphome or the game Checkers. Help us help you!

Do you see esphome inside HA and is it running? Heres how it looks on mine. You can see that its clearly up and running.

Screenshot_20240801-201616_Home Assistant
Screenshot_20240801-201616_Home Assistant1080×2280 166 KB

Also, which way are you using to install BT proxy? Going to a link and install from it or copy and pasting the necessary configuration options and doing it manually?

3

OK, sorry for not being concise - just starting out. I appreciate that you took time to reply.

So - complete vs not complete: I installed BT proxy via this link: Ready-Made Projects — ESPHome
I used the M5 atom lite option and hardware.

I think part of my confusion is that I thought that the Bluetooth Proxy was using ESP Home, because the page I referred to above, calls it “a ready made ESP Home project”, but I don’t think it is. I thought I had a limited functionality ESPHome, but maybe I didn’t. Now, however, I have adopted the BT Proxy within the ESP Home add on, so I think they are working together as intended.

When I installed ESP home via the link within my home assistant instance - the Bluetooth proxy stopped working, and I lost the functionality of the Mopeka sensor. at the end of the installation, ESP Home put new firmware in the ATOM lite, which I think is part of my problem, as it would not connect to my home wifi network, that has now been sorted out.

I have added ESP home into my add ons, and after a bunch of trial and error, managed to get that working.

Now I am trying to figure out how to add another device that uses the bluetooth Proxy. I think that is how it works, but maybe I am wrong and need another ESPdevice to gather the Bluetooth advertisement.

My current goal is to get the data being broadcast from the Otodata device over bluetooth onto my dashboard.

As of yet I’m not advanced enough to install manually, which will have to change, I need to add code to ESP Home to accomplish the above, and this will be the first try with YAML

4

So, it is working now? Esphome node is showing up in your esphome dashboard?

I dont understand what you mean by

“When I installed ESP home via the link within my home assistant instance - the Bluetooth proxy stopped working”

Your not downloading anything from that link, that link is beginning the process of flashing whatever esp board is connected to that pc.

Was the original BT proxy still plugged into the pc when you are using with that link?

You know you can aways just do it manually too.

  1. Plug in board
  2. Open esphome
  3. New project
  4. Go through the steps.
  5. Add BT proxy manually.

Its literally like 5 things you need to copy paste. It’s extremely simple to do.

5

Any Home Assistant compatible Bluetooth device that is in range of the proxy you have created will work without you needing to do anything more to that proxy. ie: a single Bluetooth proxy can handle many clients and you don’t need to configure the proxy to communicate with those clients. If a bluetooth device that is HA compatible is within range of the proxy it should be detected by HA automatically.

6

I finally got it working, but I still don’t really understand it. I can install Bluetooth Proxy on an ESP32, and Home assistant sees it in ESP home, and it has a button to adopt it. If I adopt it, it stops working, never reconnecting.

This last time I installed the Bluetooth Proxy, I didn’t try to adopt it, and now it shows up all of a sudden in ESPhome the same as another ESP device that I have ESP home Web installed on. Weird. But I’ll take it!

I am using the Proxy to communicate with a Mopeka sensor, and that is all good now.

My next step is trying to figure out how to get the Mac Address of a Nee-Vo sensor on an adjacent tank.

But Yes, it’s working! Thanks for the input.

7

So what I’m trying to do now, is get the Nee-Vo information into Home Assistant as per the linked topic in my first post.

Seems first step is to get the Mac address of the Nee-Vo Device, so I am trying to follow this BLE Tracker link:
https://esphome.io/components/binary_sensor/ble_presence#esp32-ble-tracker-setting-up-devices

I think I need to do this with a different ESP32, so that is what I have been trying.

I don’t understand how to use it. Do I add a new device (separate ESP32) and paste the following code in place of the existing YAML of the new device?

#Example configuration entry for finding
#Service UUIDs and iBeacon UUIDs and identifiers
 esp32_ble_tracker:

logger:
  level: VERY_VERBOSE
8

There are documentation for doing these things.