How to restrict or disable BLE Beacon from NUC running HAOS

ESPHome
1

I recently started messing around with Bluetooth proxies and Bermuda BLE Trilateration (which is quite good!). I got myself a few EPS32 devices as beacons in a couple rooms, however I noticed that the Intel NUC that is running HAOS also of course had built in Bluetooth, and immediately picked itself up as another Beacon for my Office area.

So this was good in the beginning as it saves me 1 beacon that I don’t have to make, I realized something weird when it came to signal strength (I think?):

Whenever I was out of range of most beacons, or whenever a beacon’s signal was slightly weak relatively to my phone’s position, it would switch the location to Office despite my device not being anywhere close to the device. In fact there are likely 1 or 2 other beacons closer than the NUC in my Office.

So the only thing that made sense to me was either it would always default to that in Home Assistant given it was part of the NUC, or the BT range was far greater on the NUC than any of the other ESP32 devices I had.

Here’s a screenshot of the Bluetooth proxies on my Home Assistant:

Screenshot 2025-07-05 10.04.48 PM
Screenshot 2025-07-05 10.04.48 PM1407×1189 69.2 KB

The last device is the HAOS running NUC which currently has Passive Scanning on. It should be noted that other than the 3 proxies shown there, I don’t use any other Bluetooth devices on my Home Assistant instance, so I’m wondering if disabling it here may be useful?

I was thinking also at worse I could turn off BT somehow on the NUC, and if I wanted presence detection I can just get another ESP32 in my office instead.

Any advice here would be great.

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You should be able to disable Bluetooth in the NUC’s Bios. While you’re there, you could also disable the Wifi if you’re not using it. It’ll reduce the power consumption by a tiny amount, but every little helps.

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What happens if you use ‘disable device’ in the Bluetooth integration?

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@zoogara disabling it from the Bluetooth Integration page does exactly what is expected here and now the office BLE beacon is no longer available. The other BLE beacons do their job and it will report the location back based on the closest one within range. This seems to be the simplest alternative as it’s probably really hard to adjust the BLE range on the NUC itself is my guess.

@ShadowFist oh good idea! I don’t use wifi at all either since it’s plugged into LAN and everything else is either a zigbee or RF dongle that’s external. I guess I’ll have to bust out my monitor and keyboard to get into the bios

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Yep, or go all out, open up the NUC and remove the BT/Wifi card after disabling. It can’t be used if it’s not there :wink: