Help Understanding Bluetooth Presence

Configuration
1

I set up bluetooth presence on HA last night and it went off without a hitch, well for the most part. It detect my phone fairly quickly and correctly indicated home and away depending on whether or not bluetooth was on or not. I thought I was done at that point.

I stepped away from the computer for a bit to fix dinner and left my phone at the desk. When I came back I noticed HA was showing me away. After a minute or so it switched back to home. I figured out that it changed states when my phone re-connected to my fitbit. This is not what I was hoping for. I was hoping as long as bluetooth was on or HA was seeing my bluetooth make its periodic scans that it would show me home. However, it appears that HA is detecting or using bluetooth connections, is this correct?

If that is so, and I am working from that assumption, would it be any better or more reliable to pair my phone with bluetooth on the RPi3? I love the concept of bluetooth presence since I dont have use battery draining GPS, geo fencing, etc. If pairing directly with the RPi would not be any better, could placing some bluetooth trackers, such as Tiles, in various places in the house work better?

I am working from the assumption that as long as my phone is paired to something HA will show me home, so if that is not correct please let me know. WiFi would not work well for me either because I have my phone set up to turn off WiFi anytime the screen is off. I have already experimented with this and as one would expect, as soon as my screen turns off and the WiFi radio is turned off HA shows me away.

Anyway, just looking for some additional information to hopefully come up with a viable solution. Thanks.

2

I set an option on my config ‘consider_home’ that is supposed to buffer this problem. Seems to be working.

device_tracker:
  - platform: bluetooth_tracker
    interval_seconds: 15
    consider_home: 150
    track_new_devices: yes
3

I saw that option but was not sure how effective it would be as I did not want to set too long of timer there and negatively affect presence based automations. I may have to give that a try though.

4

Devices still show up instantly, it just delay’s the ‘not-home’ condition.

5

Yeah I’ve got bluetooth tracking setup on both my girlfriend and my phones. I’m Android she’s iPhone.

In some rare occasions, we could both be in different parts of the apartment, and we would both be marked as away, causing all the lights to shut off.

The best solution is to increase your consider home time as @dap35 suggested. I have done mine to about 10 minutes, which seems to have solved the issue.

6

I increased it to 5 minutes last night and will see how that goes. If it needs much more than that I will probably look at some sort of beacon set up.

Thanks for everyone’s help, it is very much appreciated.

7

Just out of curiosity, do you have a lot of errors in your Home Assistant log file?

I’ve found Home Assistant will stop talking to my Bluetooth radio a lot. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the cheap Bluetooth radio I have, or if it is a Docker/Synology issue. However, if you have a lot of dropouts like me, (where home assistant says “error communicating with Bluetooth radio”) then increasing your consider_home setting might be needed for both bluetooth tracking, and beacon setup (depending on the platform you go with).

8

I don’t understand, in the beginning you did not pair it with the pi3?

9

consider home 600?

10

Yep!

Just checked my config and I actually set mine to 15 minutes (so 900 seconds)

11

@anon35356645 No, never had to pair with the RPi3, well, I never did so intentionally. I just set up the sensor in HA and it detected my bluetooth and I went from there. HA may have done the pairing or something like that, I am not sure, as I don’t completely understand the process of how HA is seeing the bluetooth signals.

12

@philhawthorne I have not seen any errors pertaining to bluetooth when I check the log thus far, but I will keep an eye on it. So far, it seems to be working better at setting of 300 seconds but I will keep an eye on the log to make sure.

13

when I scan with my smartphone it does not see the pi3, although in the pi3 the bluetooth is on. Maybe I need to put the pi3 in pairing mode? How?

you are using bluetooth or bluetooth_le?

14

I believe just classic Bluetooth as it seemed easier to set up and test. I have never even logged into the GUI side of the RPi3 so, no, I have never put the Pi in pairing mode. I assume on the Pi Bluetooth starts automatically, at least that is the case for desktop Linux distros I have used. So I just set up the HA configuration file, restarted HA, hit scan on my phone for Bluetooth and waited for the known_devices.yaml file to be created.

15

Same here. It pretty much just works.

16

bluetooth or bluetooth_le?

17

I’m doing std Bluetooth, NOT LE.