Hey guys!
Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to set up BLE detection in my home using four ESP32 nodes. I placed an ESP in each room, installed ESPresense, and had a lot of fun mapping out my rooms, etc.
First of all, I only have Apple devices (iPhone, watches, MacBook)!
After initial testing, my iPhone was occasionally displayed, but the distance/positioning wasn’t quite right. At some point, I noticed that my device IDs, such as apple:1005:9-15, could change and were not reliable. However, ESPresense had received the information and the devices were also visible in the MQTT service in HA. Apparently, Apple wants the IDs to change from time to time, which is a shame! Then I found a way (according to ESPresense) to “enroll” my Apple devices on one of the nodes, which created an IRK:xyz ID for each device. The one issued by ESPresence (nodes) is displayed with distance and other information. I checked this with an MQTT Explorer. However, I also see Home Assistant entries in the Explorer, and unfortunately nothing appears there when the devices are enrolled with IRK; this apparently worked with the other IDs.
What am I doing wrong? The nodes are running on the latest firmware and the options for sending device, room, etc. topics are enabled.
I really don’t know what to do.
I thought of a cool project to use my watch and iPhone to trigger simple automations such as turning on the TV, turning lights on/off, and starting/stopping the media player. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a huge project, so I spent days trying to solve the problem with CHatGPT, but that only made things worse with endless loops of troubleshooting and other escapades. Can anyone help me?