Hello! I’m extremely new to ESP32. I have four Xiaomi Temperature sensors (LYWSD03MMC) and I read many times that they worked great with the ESP32 chip. I read later that the ESP32 could be configured as a Bluetooth Proxy, which I first thought would extend the BLE devices range through Bluetooth itself, like a repeater, but then I understood (I think) that it works through Wifi.
My current instance of Home Assistant is running on a laptop with VirtualBox (still waiting for a Yellow hub to arrive) which has Bluetooth, but the range is not great. I have these sensors on the ATC firmware and I had them integrated to HA with the “Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor” integration.
This week I got an ESP32 and I first tried configuring the sensors with the instructions in this link, using this setting:
sensor:
- platform: xiaomi_lywsd03mmc
When doing this, I disabled the Bluetooth Low Energy Monitor integration. This worked fine, but then I learnt I could use the ESP32 as a Bluetooth Proxy, and as I didn’t want to mix things too much, I went to the previous method (BLE Monitor integration) and I used the web installer to wipe the ESP32 and start “clean”.
I thought I could use the ESP32 as a Bluetooth Proxy and have the BLE Monitor integration connect to them, but this didn’t work.
One of the tutorials I watched used the ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy to connect to the Xiaomi devices with original firmware through the Xiaomi BLE integration, so I flashed the original firmware on one of the devices and tried to connect it, but it never got detected.
So please correct me where I’m wrong, or tell me if this is supposed to work or if it isn’t. I would like to connect my Xiaomi sensors to either the Xiaomi BLE integration or the BLE Monitor integration through the ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy.
I know I can simply get the ESP32 connect to the sensors using the config I mentioned earlier, but I would prefer to use the Bluetooth Proxy so future devices are discovered automatically and I don’t have to set their MAC address manually. At least that’s what I saw in the video
Any help or input is appreciated!
Rodrigo