Espresence

Third party integrations
1

Hi All,

My name is Vitaliy. I am new to Home Assistant.
My primary hub is Habitat Elevation.
Home Assistant will be companion hub. Its primary function will be add a support
for cloud-based services and BT Beacon tracking,
As of now:

  • Home Assistant is installed on RPI 3b, configured and running.
  • Already successfully integrated August Lock and SwitchBot Curtains.

My next/current project is to use BT Trackers with ESPesence, running on ESP32
and to pass something to the Hubitat Elevation.
For this project I already have:

  • ESPresence already installed, configured and running.
  • MQTT Mosquitto Brocker is installed and configured.
  • My Galaxy S10 phone configured as a BT Beacon, it is seen by ESPrecence
    and MQTT.
    But I am lost on few last steps. I did a lot of search but unfortunately did not
    come across any reasonable solution, so I am asking HA Community for help.

First problem.
I guess, I need some sort of Virtual Switch or Sensor.
I already installed Virtual Components from HACS and even created one Binary Sensor
by adding next lines into cinfiguration.yaml file

binary_sensor:
  - platform: virtual
    name: 'Presence Status VK'
    initial_value: 'off'
    class: presence
    initial_availability: true

Sensor is somewhat visible but how do I control it?

Second problem is - I cannot create Automation for linking MQTT BT Tracker with
Virtual Device. Most likely this is due to the absence of a correct Virtual Device
(my first problem).

Any ideas are greatly appreciated but real example will be even more helpful.