ESPHome RSSI help

[gigil (Suddhasheel Ghosh)]

Context: I have set up ESPresence and it works like a charm. However, not happy with the fact that it requires a device of its own. So I was hoping to achieve the same with ESPHome’s inbuilt functionality.

Here’s what I did:
Turning on my home assistant app’s iBeacon and ble tracking on an ESP, I got the following log:

[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:500]: Parse Result:
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:517]:   Address: 67:D7:23:7E:1D:72 (RANDOM)
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:519]:   RSSI: -83
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:520]:   Name: ''
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:534]:   Manufacturer data: 02.15.BC.69.3F.AD.D9.32.40.AA.89.92.E1.F6.FD.44.4E.57.00.64.00.01.C5 (23)
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:537]:     iBeacon data:
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:538]:       UUID: 574E44FD-F6E1-9289-AA40-32D9AD3F69BC
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:539]:       Major: 100
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:540]:       Minor: 1
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:541]:       TXPower: -59
[22:22:59][VV][esp32_ble_tracker:550]: Adv data: 1A.FF.4C.00.02.15.BC.69.3F.AD.D9.32.40.AA.89.92.E1.F6.FD.44.4E.57.00.64.00.01.C5 (27)

I noticed that the UUID was in reverse order of what my phone showed me.
I tried both orders to see if I could track rssi from my phone’s transmission.

  - platform: ble_rssi
    service_uuid: 'bc693fad-d932-40aa-8992-e1f6fd444e57'
    name: "BLE Test Service 16 bit RSSI value"

  - platform: ble_rssi
    service_uuid: '574E44FD-F6E1-9289-AA40-32D9AD3F69BC'
    name: "RSSI value"

No luck, I get an “unknown” value on the GUI, even though RSSI is being read by my esp32 and shows up in the logs

after doing a little digging, I did find the following potential solutions:

iBeacon support for ble_presence

and

GitHub - rpatel3001/BleDistance: Distance tracking for BLE iBeacons in esphome

However, I have no clue how to get code from github into my HA instance(running on an rpi).
I was hoping someone would help me out in that regard. I am partial to the first solution because it seems to have been reviewed by an ESPHome founder and Employee.

Any help would be very welcome

[WallyR (Wally)]

Seems like you only need to do some changes to your configuration.yaml file.
The actually code that enables this goes on the ESPHome device.

[Fallingaway24 (Justin)]

I stumbled across this and can verify that it does work. The distances returned aren’t always super accurate but, they’re pretty close and usually within a couple of feet. The two beacons from my screen shot, the one that is 8.1’ the actual distance is roughly 6’ and the other one, the actual distance is roughly 3.5’. This is close enough for me and far more useful than a sensor that displays the rssi value which is essentially useless numbers to me.