ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy Basics

Configuration
1

I recently set up my bluetooth proxy and am confused about some of the fundamentals. I have had a functioning bluetooth USB dongle on my HA hardware before recently setting up the proxy.

  1. I am not supposed to remove the USB bluetooth dongle, am I?
  2. First, how do I know if the proxy is successfully connecting to devices?
  3. Does the USB dongle also attempt to communicate with the same devices that are connected via the proxy?

Thanks for any help.

2
  1. Yes you can remove the dongle
  2. You can see them in the logs (check your configured log level) or depending on the device discovered in HA.
  3. See 1.
3

@fleskefjes Thank you; to clarify, I wasn’t asking if I could remove the dongle, but whether I should. I would hope/assume it effectively acts as another proxy node among a network of nodes to get complete and reliable bluetooth coverage. Do I need to remove the USB dongle in order to allow the proxies to instead connect?

Also, I did enable debugging briefly to try to see what was going on. I only saw a connection to an IP address in the logs, no named devices were listed. Am I doing something wrong?

4

You can have as many bluetooth proxies and dongles as you like. You can leave the dongle be. HA will not go crazy if a device is seen twice. And the proxy works if you can integrate the device you wanted to.

But the question is, what were you hoping to integrate? Some things are automatically discovered. And some people that configured HA to detect every bluetooth device that comes along are probably still working out how to delete a gazillion device trackers :wink:

5

I already have a bunch of bluetooth devices connected (and I did at some point figure out how to stop the bluetooth trackers popping up incidentally.) I am mainly wanting to ensure they don’t go “unavailable” as often. How can I determine if a given device is communicating via a specific proxy? How will it be identified in the logs, debugging logs only I presume?

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6

Was about to post a n00b question myself but figured here was as good a place to put it rather that starting a new topic…
I have just set up my first bluetooth proxy (dedicated), and planning to add a bunch more around the house for phone presence detection
I already have a couple of ESP32 for various other functions (e.g. light sensing, temperature sensing)

My question is, is there any reason I can’t add bluetooth proxy functionality to those devices?

From what i can tell it would just be adding the lines below to their YAML? But is that going to cause me any issues?

esp32_ble_tracker:
  scan_parameters:
    active: true

bluetooth_proxy:
  active: true

And the second dumb question; do i need to worry about device routing or anything or is it ‘seamless’?

Edit: I think it might even be as simple as adding bluetooth_proxy:

7

No, no reason at all

^this

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8

Thanks - and am I right that I just need to add those two sections to the YAML?

9

Possibly memory issues on the ESP, but no… If there is enough memory then it should be fine.
Devices can freely move between the different proxys.

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