Espresense device id - how to get them?

There was something wrong with my base stations. I could see the beacon in the espressence log but nothing wad coming to HA. I reflashed my esp32 base stations and they all started working. Those blue charm beacons are very nice. Is that what you used?

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Iā€™m glad it all worked out! Yes I only use Blue Charm and they have been awesome :slight_smile:

Hmm, also having issues with more than one ESP32 base station. I have three.

Although entires exist in MQTT for the irk to device id/name for most devices, I have one that always reverts to just a name. Without the id it wonā€™t trigger anything properly in HASS. Iā€™ve published the correct entry but it seems to revert. Tried rebooting the base stations, but something keeps on happening that causes it to revert.

Pretty sure yesterday I also had this issue with another device, but that one is sticking. Hmm.

For now Iā€™m sticking with the irk values even for iOS devices. It just works for now, and Iā€™ll revisit the MQTT based configs in the future. Ideally I would place all irk values even for watches in MQTT to share the config between all base stations. Pasting the space-delimited list on all devices is a PITA :slight_smile:

Are you able to do anything meaningful with any that have a button? Even with the shortest broadcast duration, it takes forever for HA to revert the states of the beacon and beacon button. It takes so long sometimes, several minutes and I havnt been able to use it for anything worthwhile because of the delay.

a little question. Using the mode with the Apple:id111xxxā€¦ . it works very well ā€¦ but there is a delay of 5 sec approx. is this going to improve that? as I know ā€¦ the BLE has the particularity to update less than a normal bluetooth.

Golden explanation!! Thank you very much!! :smiley:

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I know Iā€™m gonna post this, and someone is going to point out how stupid I am. I am pasting in that field, and nothing is coming out of the box that looks anything like 32 charactersā€¦

Also, Iā€™m typing in my password just once to reveal what is in the ā€œshow passwordā€ field.

never-mind. i discovered on my own that iā€™m stupid. That field has a lot in there thatā€™s hidden!

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Anybody have issues with the irk updating slow. I got the watch to show up but it only shows the room state for 2 mins then switches to not_home.

I found the longer my nodes are on, the less responsive or lack of response is higher. I made an automation that restarts all my nodes every 6 hours and it helps. I still canā€™t quite get it dialed in though. Until there are major improvements, I just wouldnā€™t even try to use these for anything that needs to be very reliable. They work good for locating things like keys, wallets, pets, etc. They work pretty good when used in combination with other presence detection sensors as well but, as a stand alone presence detection to control automations like turning on/off lights as you leave a room and enter another, it just isnā€™t there yet IMO. They are to inconsistent, not 100% accurate because itā€™s almost impossible to keep thr nodes from overlapping and a device location bounces back and forth between 2 rooms or sometimes not at all. You just have to have realistic expectations and not expect these to precisely track you room to room in real time, thatā€™s not gonna happen, at least not yet.

Could someone help me with how to do this?

I followed everything up until this point and donā€™t understand how to do this.

Essentially my mqtt_room sesnors are both showing ā€œnot_homeā€ with no distance reported and I think this tutorial will help me get everything going but I donā€™t really understand how to take care of this part.

I use mosquitto broker in home assistant.

Do I need another program to do this.

I am using home assistant os installed on a pi.

EDIT: Ahh, I got this part figured out but my mqtt_room devices (iphone and iwatch) are still showing ā€œnot_homeā€ with distance of unknown

Hoping someone here can give some guidance. Mqtt room sensor are configured with irk and have 2 espresense devices both showing ā€œconnectedā€ in home assistant.

  - platform: mqtt_room
    device_id: "irk:redacted"
    name: "Westons iPhone BLE"
    state_topic: "espresense/rooms"
    timeout: 10
    away_timeout: 120
  - platform: mqtt_room
    device_id: "irk:redacted"
    name: "Westons iWatch Room Presence"
    state_topic: "espresense/rooms"
    timeout: 10
    away_timeout: 120

Hi Weston,

So you do need another program. I use MQTT Explorer on my Mac or MQTT Loupe on my iPhone. Both allow you to see the messages going through the MQTT server and you can click on a message topic and delete it. I mentioned that I used this tool to find the IRK just after the fingerprint process.

So you can click on the topic ā€œespresense/settingsā€ within the MQTT Explorer application (or your chosen one) and then delete the topic using the bin icon. See my screenshot today which is highlighting a different message topic as Iā€™ve already removed my settings topic.

Screenshot 2024-09-18 at 08.49.37

Hope that helps.

I wish it would have. For some reason. I cannot get this working.

I took care of what you are showing me there and restarted ha and the espressnse device after following the rest of your write up and am still having no luck.

Iā€™m about to throw in the towel on this one I believe. :expressionless:

Can you think of any other troubleshooting I can do?

Thank you for trying to help me out. I donā€™t know whatā€™s messed up honestly.

I also edited my original post with more information and screenshots in case it helps. Thank you!!

It looks like this is working now after a complete reboot of my home assistant instance. Restart never did the trick for me for some reason but it looks like the reboot did. I am now getting room names showing in the Mqtt room sensor and a distance populated within the attributes. Thank you for offering your assistance again!!

Glad to hear itā€™s working for you now Weston.

I was going to suggest you observed the MQTT topic messages whilst you moved around to ensure that Espresence was correctly posting updates to MQTT or not. Obviously no need now!

:+1:

Initially, I used a VMWare Mac (Sonoma) and the lookup method to do this. I have since found that I was able to get IRK of iPhone 16 Pro using the method from here using a spare wroom32 and Bluetooth Terminal app (from app store).