I would like to automate my irrigation system and for that I bought the Parkside PBB A1 Bluetooth water valve. (Side note: they had it in the past as Zigbee and it was supported by HA, but the Zigbee version doesn’t exist any longer)
I’m running the latest HA on a Home Assistant Yellow. It looks like it has a Bluetooth device build in. At least I can find one under devices. It says: bcm43438-bt by Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd
When I bring the Parkside PBB A1 valve into pairing mode, I cannot see any new discovered devices. This is where I am stuck.
Could you please help me figure out whether:
I’m doing something wrong, or
The device is simply not supported by HA
If the latter, are there maybe some ways to reprogram the valve to support Zigbee or develop some configuration to natively support the Bluetooth version in HA?
It’s quite unlikely the rpi is in BT range of your valve in the first place, really.
rpi’s are known to produce a lot of EM noise that drastically limit their BT range.
That being said, I have no clue whether that BT device is supported by HA.
It’s quite unlikely as well, unfortunately.
I‘m not so concerned about the BT range yet. The Home Assistant Yellow and the valve are literally on the same desk. So, I would expect to see at least something.
But, as you mentioned, it is very likely that this devise is not supported yet.
I’m keen on getting my hands dirty to add this device to the list of supported devices. How can I do that?
first you need register on the Tuya developer site, set up everything as required (see localtuya documentation - better to set it up with a tuya device that uses wifi).
I managed to see this device on the tuya developer portal, and added it to Home Assistant as well. The valve is working from the Tuya and the Lidl home apps, BUT not updating in HA. It shows the status changes /logs on the developer portal, but the status is always ‘offline’, even when I send commands from my phone.
I’ve set up an esphome bluetooth proxy, but my phone is in range. If I do ‘bluetoothctl’ from my raspberry pi, the valve’s MAC address never shows up
The fun thing is, that I’ve set up an irrigation cycle for 8:00 and 19:00 but at 00:05 this morning my wife woke me up that the irrigation is running
There was a notification from the Tuya app, but the valve itself was disconnected. I needed to shut the main valve manually to stop it… afterwards I’ve reseted everything back to step 2.
This is a great step into the right direction. Thank you for the tip with Tuya. I didn’t know it and looked it up. It seems, that if you do it the way you described, the communication with the Parkside valve will always go via the Tuya servers. This is error prone and maybe too slow.
I watched this YouTube video about Tuya (in German) and it looks like, you can get the BL encryption key (local key) and the MAC address of the the Parkside valve from Tuya. Then it should be, at least theoretically, possible to connect the valve directly to HA and avoid the communication with the Tuya server.
Hi, I’m only interested in opening the valve programatically, that I can do from the Tuya app - would be nice to do it remotely; but once programmed, the valve does the cycles now without any live bluetooth connection.
I’d like to receive the start/stop notifications in HA, but to no avail.
The HA BLE plugin gets the required keys from the API and I have the local key, but the Raspi’s bluetooth can’t see the valve’s mac address - if it could, it would work. I’m running the plugin in debug mode for some days, before returning the valve.
As it was only a technology test for me (that failed successfully), I’m off with this BLE valve thing, it is simply a dead end (I built the pipelines with Gardena, wanted to buy their BLE device (€80) but it has even more restrictions).
The other problem I see with BLE devices is that it has no real security. I’ve picked up my neighbours’ other Lidl/tuya devices as well, and at least I can read the status of them without authorization, that’s crazy.
Furthermore I’d never trust a €25 valve to run my garden with a possibly errorous opening costing €3/hour in water bills
@kbalint, likewise, I’m returning it. In my other project I’m using the Hunter PGV 101 24V AC valves with an ESP relay board to control everything via WiFi. There is a keep-alive between the HA and ESP every 60 seconds. If it looses the keep-alive signal for longer than 3 minutes, then all valves close automatically.
But, I’m a bit disappointed with the Bluetooth solution. In the past they had these devises with Zigbee and those are easily to integrate into HA. However, the Zigbee devices are no longer available.
I also bought a PARKSIDE PBB A1 and wanted to integrate it into HA, but so far without success. I have a Shelly BLE proxy nearby and wanted to connect the PBB A1 to HA via it, is this possible?
