How do you set up a home/not_home tracker without ESP32/ESPresense?

Configuration
1

Hi
Apologies if this is a daft question, but I’ve drawn a blank on my testing and searches.

I look after 2 HA instances.
One here for our home inc. Zigbee and BT dongle and multiple ESP32.
The second is at my mum’s and her system has Zigbee and BT dongle.

I built her system to detect potential fall or sickness.
If [no motion >4hrs], [9am > midnight], NTFY us "kids" to check on her.

Recently my mum’s mobile stopped updating when she was away from her WiFi, so we’ve been getting a lot of false alerts when she’s oot n aboot as HA doesn’t know she’s away.

I know what it is. It’s not switching to the internet connection when not connected to her home SSID, but she’s 400 miles away so I can’t do anything to fix it until I see her next.
So in the meantime I got a Eufy SmartTrack tracker for her keys for HA to track instead of her phone.

I had the dongle sent here so I could set it up on our system to get the config to preload her system before posting it up. That way it should seamlessly start tracking as soon as she receives it.

I added iBeacon and nothing.
Then I tried manually entering bluetooth_le_tracker in the configuration.yaml. Not detecting anything
Last I tried adding the tracker UUID in iBeacon to detect. Still nothing.
I could try adding it as a Private BLE Device (how I track my Samsung phone), but I don’t know to get the Eufy’s IRK to add it.

Just to validate it worked, I added it to our Espresense as a known device and added it as a - platform: mqtt_room sensor and aye, it works perfectly with my ESP32s for room tracking.

But for her, how can I set tracking for home/not_home in a system that only has a Bluetooth Dongle?

2

Ok. For those that want to do it and aren’t sure how.

Start with adding Bluetooth LE Tracking to your config.yaml

# Bluetooth
bluetooth:
# BT Tracking
device_tracker:
  - platform: bluetooth_le_tracker
    track_new_devices: false
    interval_seconds: 30

Make sure track_new_devices = false otherwise it picks up everything and your tracker will get lost in the list of seen devices.Our BT dongle is too good. I swear it can monitor the whole town (it doesn’t help that we’re near a modestly busy road)

Then you need to get the Bluetooth MAC address from the tracker.
I have ESPresense room trackers here so I selected 2 of them and removed any filters.

Then use MQTT Explorer to monitor all available BT MAC addresses and move the tracker from one to the other to find which MAC showed a significant distance change.

Now you have the MAC, add the device to the known_devices.yaml.

My-Tracker:
  name: My-Tracker
  mac: BLE_AB:12:34:56:78:90
  icon:
  picture:
  track: true

Reboot to activate the Bluetooth LE Tracker integration + the new known device and it will start tracking it as home/away.

If you’re in a quiet location (not many bluetooth devices around) then you might be able to get the BT MAC using only lightblue or NRF Connect. It’s noisy here, so using our ESP32s was the easiest option.

After I did this I added the tracker info to my mum’s known_devices.yaml and posted it up to her. As soon as the postie delivered it it started tracking :smiley:
image