Added a Bluetooth stick to my server, and made it reboot “a couple of times”, as per the documentation. It was already being recognised perfectly fine, but I did a few more reboots anyway because the documentation says so. No idea why though, but alas, here we are.
So now, how do I go about adding a BT device?
In any other OS, I need to start a scan for nearby devices. In HA such option isn’t available. But it also doesn’t magically scan by itself, it seems, or it would’ve found something at least - there’s always something nearby, I have neighbours with BT devices, I have a mouse, I have a lamp that I think might possibly have BT, I have a phone, a laptop, and possibly more that I don’t even realise contains BT.
Even if there are no BT devices nearby, the very least I want it to say is “I’ve scanned the area, but didn’t find anything”.
Currently, the BT is just sitting there, seemingly doing bumall.
I don’t think matters which exact BT stick I’m using, since the integration for it is working perfectly and the device’s hardware properties are detected and showing up correctly.
If you just want to scan for devices, Bermuda works very well, though it’s intended for room-level presence detection. It should detect nearby devices through your Bluetooth stick without the need to add any proxies.
If you want to connect to Bluetooth devices, I think you’ll need the appropriate integration for each one. The Bluetooth stick is just the hardware part - it doesn’t pair like Bluetooth on a phone.
It’s always ‘scanning’. Only things that have an integration will show up (and who’s integration supports discovery, which most/all core ones do). Do you have such a device?
@jackjourneyman Thanks for your input, but I don’t think you quite understood my intention. I wanted to scan for devices with the intent to pair them permanently. Say for example, a Hue lamp. Presence detection appears to be a whole other beast in its own right. Something to remember for another time, for sure.
@brooksben11 Thank you. I do have such device, but in order to know for sure, wouldn’t it be useful if HA would show some kind of feedback on what it has found so far? I have plenty of BT devices, but with zero feedback I can’t tell apart:
Is the integration working at all?
Is the hardware even working?
Are any found BT devices supported?
Are my BT devices letting themselves be found (in pairing mode)?
Do you understand now why it’s important that a feature doesn’t only “just work”, because when it appears not to, you’re stuck with literally nothing to go on. The fourth point can’t be fixed by HA, but I can’t know if that’s the problem if I don’t know the answer to 1-3.
You kind of seem to be talking in circles. BT only works with devices that there’s an integration for. If you don’t have one of those devices, you’re not going to see anything in HA. If you have a device you think it should be seeing, tell us what that is.
If you look at the logs for the BT Proxy, it will show you what it’s doing/seeing.
I think there’s something I didn’t make quite clear.
To know whether some device has an integration, it would have to show up. If it doesn’t, the whole BT mechanism could also be broken - there’s no way to tell if it doesn’t seemingly do anything. It needs to show some kind of feedback when no devices are found, so that the user knows BT itself works correctly.
To answer your question directly: I tried with a Hue lamp - I think those have BT as well. I also tried a plain vanilla BT mouse - nothing shows up.
The point is, when I scan with my laptop, I see all kinds of devices. When I scan (or rather, not-scan) with HA, I see nothing showing up, which leads back to my original point: is BT even working in the first place?
@thany, if you use Home Assistant OS, you can run the following in the terminal: bluetoothctl devices. It will show the Bluetooth devices discovered by the OS.