ESPHome, ESP32s, Unifi and BlueTooth LE

Hi all,

I have HAOS running on an Intel NUC that has a Bluetooth device. I have a number of BlueTooth LE devices especially 14 HHCCJCY01 - Mi Flora - devices. Some of these are located in the garden at the back of my house, the rest scattered around the house. No matter where I placed the NUC I couldn’t get it to talk to all the devices so I looked in to alternative solutions which is when I first discovered ESPHome.

I purchased a couple of ESP32s, set them up with ESPHome and placed them around the house. Although the logs show them successfully connecting to the various BluetoothLE devices and reading data from them, the logs also show them constantly disconnecting from the Wifi.

I’ve done a lot of Googling, searched this forum and experimenting. A lot of people seem to experience this problem with network dropouts of ESP32 devices on Unifi networks. The most common solution which seems to work is adding power_save_mode: none to the ESPHome Wifi config but I can’t do this because it’s not compatible with esp32_ble_tracker:

I have lots of questions but they can all be summarised as: Does anyone have this combination - HHCCJCY01 > ESP32 > Unifi network - working reliably? If so, what did you have to tweak to get it to work?

Thanks

Steve

A lot variables matter.

Unifi firmware version can be a big one. And the version may be different between MediaTek and Qualcomm chipsets.

Common settings between the two for 2.4 dedicated SSID include DTIM 1, all advanced settings off.

Plus ESP dev board differences play a role here too. My TinyPicos have far better signal db than my Huzzah’s.

Either way, I try to keep them <70bB.

Good luck🤞