EspHome BLE Presence with speaker and LD2410

Ok so I’ve been researching for a couple of days, but can’t seem to find the right answers.

I have very very little experience with EspHome. My experience is mostly with esp8266 chips (D1 Minis) and tasmota.

With the D1 Mini and tasmota I am able to set the LD2410 mmWave sensor. To that same D1 Mini I want to add a speaker so that I can push TTS notifications via HA. I was able to compile the bin file to include USE_I2S_AUDIO and use USE_LD2410. I am able to get LD2410 to work, but for the audio I get no luck.

For the amp I am using a MAX98357 but I am a bit confused, as some call it an amp while others call it a DAC. (I did compile with USE_I2S_NO_DAC and didn’t work either)

All the instructions I’ve been able to find center around the ESP32, but not much info on how to set audio on ESP8266.

I do have about 5 ESP32’s with BLE that was going to use as BLE proxies. I was able to flash using the ESP tools. The proxy was to connect different LD2410s via bluetooth. At some point I got it working, but it was very glitchy as sometimes things would disconnect. Decided not to use BLE proxies for the LD2410s.

I now plan to use those 5 ESP32s as BLE room presence detection. Going by memory but I think there is in ESP installation tool for that.

So here are my questions:

  1. Is it possible to set up a d1 mini (esp8266) with LD2410 and the MAX98357 to run a small speaker? If so could someone share some links for me to look at please.

2)Is it possible to set up an ESP32 with BLE as a BLE Presence detection, with the MAX98357 and the LD2410? If so could someone share some links please.

Pretty positive you won’t be able to do both. BT Proxy is very resource intensive and I believe I tried combining it with that exact component and it wouldn’t even compile. Doesn’t hurt to try, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work.

Seems most of the instructions for BLE presence were for Format-BLE-Tracker but the github is not working (seems it is ready only). It seems the new project is Bermuda for BLE tracking.

Also I realized I didn’t understand how BLE presence worked. I was under the impression that you installed the BLE presence onto many ESP32s, but after taking a closer look I see that ESP32s are set up as proxy sensors, and the BLE presence is installed once on HA.

Not sure where to even start to compile. Would I first use the installation tool to set up the BLE proxy, then once that is up and running try to edit the code to add the Max98357?

I’d start here:

Thanks for the suggestion, but already have that part configured.

So according to this link I2S Audio - Tasmota esp8266 does support i2s audio, I just can’t seem to get it to work with Tasmota.

With ESPHome I was also able to get the LD4210 working, but when I tired to get the I2S Audio working (without anything else) It wouldn’t compile as it seems it only works on ESP32 boards, not the ESP8266

I did try to compile ESPHome with BLE proxy and something else, but got an error since it ran out of space. So seems my BLE proxies will just be BLE proxies.

Still trying to figure out how to get both I2S Audio and LD4210 on one device.

I2S audio does not work in esp8266 in esphome. It’s in the docs

Thanks Nick. I did go down a rabbit whole and figured that part out. Also never got it to work with tasmota even though it says it supposedly does support it.

I spent about 3 hours yesterday chasing my tail. To get the LD2410 to work in tasmota you HAVE TO set pin TX as TX and pin RX as RX, then connect the LD2410 TX pin to RX in Di Mini LD2410 RX pin to the TX pin. Turns out in ESPHome is backwards, you connect LD2410 TX to DI Minis TX and Rx to Rx. I didn’t noticed the first time I had it working on the ESPHome config TX was set up as RX and RX was set up as TX, so on my first attempt I got it working by accident.