Hi to all.
I have some Xiaomi devices on hand i would like to integrate into my Home Assistant installation.
I first tried to use the official Xiaomi Home integration, but no device showed up. Most certainly because the devices I have are not supported, at least i later found out that to be the case.
Those devices are two LYWSD03MMC temperature and humidity monitors, two LYWSD02 clocks with temperature and humidity monitoring, and one CGD1 alarm clock.
For the first two, problem solved already: i just flashed them to be Zigbee compliant, i then associated them to my hub, and they work with no problems.
Different story are the clocks and the alarm. They seem to not be able to have the same treatment. As far as i did look for, the Xiaomi BLE component for Home Assistant should handle them both beautifully, provided i have the bind keys on hand. But that seems to require an ESPHome device with the ESP32 BLE tracker component on, and cannot use a simple USB Bluetooth dongle (provided I use one that should work: I also did read about HA being very picky on that side!), and it would be the first time i get my hands on that too (I should work out how to set up that from scratch, from a virgin ESP32 device or something other that runs on). I am quite new to Home Assistant as well.
Before crashing into that, i read countless articles about (so many i am not even able to retrieve them), and i remember quite a few did not call for an ESPHome device as an intermediate component. I remember one simply called to unencrypt the LYWSD02.
I am now very confused about this being the only way of using these devices or not.
Can someone clarify things out a bit to me?
Thanks.