BLE support would be really really great. I have an Elgato Eve Energy in the bedroom but it often disconnects from the Apple TV in the living room. Having my Rpi3B+ closer to the Eve Energy would eliminate this problem!
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It’s still one of my personal priorities, but the clash between the GLib event loop running in one thread and the asyncio event loop running in the main thread, then trying to use threading primitives to mash them together… It’s not exactly being very stable.
Currently working on an entirely asyncio native client. Starting with IP accessories and supporting local push notifications, but hope to start evaluating aioble soon.
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@Jc2k Many thanks for the update. I am no programmer but I do work hard at testing and have enough understanding that I can provide feedback. Let me know if I can be of assistance.
I also have WIFI homekit devices (as koogeek WIFI plug) but I don’t see it in HA…anyone can help me?
In configuration.yaml I have this line:
default_config:
but I don0t see any homekit devices in integration section…
Still no progress on the BLE front - barely had any time for Home Assistant this last quarter. That said the plan is still the same - going native asyncio is still the priority. The asyncio IP client is working, but not yet stable enough to merge. This will allow event support, which is pretty much a requirement for BLE devices because they are so slow to poll.
I did try something people here might be interested in though.
I have quite a few test Eve devices that I want to use with Home Assistant, and I know it’s going to be a while before I can look at them. So… I recently picked up an Eve Extend which is a HomeKit Wifi to Bluetooth bridge. It’s meant to be used as a range extender, but I wanted to see if it could let us use Eve accessories with Home Assistant.
I used the Eve app on an iPhone to have it join my WiFi, then assigned all my Eve devices to it (Eve Thermo, Eve Motion, Eve Energy, Eve Smoke Detector). You can only do this with the official Eve app - it’s a vendor HomeKit extension rather than an implementation of the official spec. I found when everything is working in the Eve app on iOS you can unpair the bridge and all the accessories stay connected to the bridge, and it remains on your WiFi. Then you can pair with HASS. Seems to work!
Full disclosure - the first time i tried this it worked perfectly first time. I think at that point I was using a FRITZ!Box 7530 for WiFi. Getting it to work at home was more problematic. There I have UniFi. It did work, but I had to reset it and try a few times before I got it to join the WiFi network. It would join the WiFi (could only tell through router DHCP reservations) but then fail to pair. I think it went through on the third go.
There are of course limitations:
- The bridge can only take up to 8 accessories.
- homekit_controller is still a polling integration until I finish this. So there are delays of up to a minute on picking up changes. So whilst the Eve Motion is supported, it’s not its most useful.
- The smoke alarm is detected enough to monitor its battery, but thats it so far.
- To add more devices later you will need to unpair from HASS, repair with Eve iOS app, unpair, repair with HASS. Right now only an unpair with the homekit_python cli is good enough and HASS “unpair” only breaks the connection on the HASS side. So this is something of a pain.
This should work for other Eve products too, although testing required. E.g. Eve Room 2 - I think the temperature and humidity sensors would work out of the box, and probably a battery reading too. But if memory serves we’ll need to add a bit of code to support for the VOC reading.
Native bluetooth support is still something I want to do, but realistically it’s a long way out.
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I’m looking forward to when it supports events. I recently purchased several Ecobee Smart Switch+ devices which have an integrated motion sensor. It is detected by Home Assistant but, like you said, its value is acquired via polling so the ‘time-to-detection’ is usually too long for triggering automations.
The Switch+ also has a light sensor and temperature sensor. All are detected as HomeKit accessories. Whenever support for events is implemented, will light and temperature values also be handled as events or will they continue to be polled? If so, what is the threshold that will be used to report a state-change? For example, will it be 0.5 C for temperature and 1 lux for light intensity?
Or will temperature and light, which aren’t particularly ‘time critical’, continue to be polled every minute?
This thread is about Bluetooth HomeKit devices, and in particular the Elgato Eve ones. AIUI the Ecebobee products are IP based so this is a bit off topic here?
Events are especially important for BLE devices as they are more likely to be battery powered and we don’t want to wake the device up once a minute to poll if we can help it.
I cannot say how particular devices will behave when we have event support in homekit_controller, a lot of it is up to the devices themselves. The current implementation will subscribe to events for any characteristic that it polls if the device supports it. So if your temperature sensor supported events then Home Assistant would be able to make use of them. For the temperature characteristic, this is optional for the accessory manufacturer though.
It’s likely that polling will still be used in addition to events at first. We don’t know how reliable the new event code is, so we’ll keep the existing code in place while we see. Even if we relax this and poll event characteristics less often, we’ll of course still be polling characteristics that don’t support events.
Regarding the resolution of data collected - we support whatever the underlying device supports, and if the device reports a change we report the change to the HA state machine.
Yes, the Ecobee Switch+ is IP based. However, my understanding is that you plan to implement support for events so, unless the goal is to limit that support to Bluetooth devices only, I believe my questions were on-topic.
Thanks for your reply. I look forward to testing the new version whenever it is released.
Hoping you are making progress on BLE, I could use this for the Level Lock as well.
+1 can’t use my Eve motion sensors and Eve switches …
Cross-posting this from another thread as my Eve Motion, Eve Energy (switch), Eve Smoke and Eve Thermo are now working great with homekit_controller via an Eve Extend:
Just wanted to post an update about Eve Extend. My first Eve Extend had been really patchy with my home WiFi (Unifi). I recently resolved to reset it and try again. Unfortunately the usb socket came off the PCB. Not great.
2nd Eve Extend just arrived. I set it up exactly as before. Used the Eve app on iOS to pair each Eve device i have (the bridge itself + Eve Thermo, Eve Motion, Eve Smoke and Eve Energy) with my phone (not HA). Then used the Eve app to “move” each of those devices to the Extend. (So phone then routes all requests to the devices using the Eve Extend as a bridge). Then i used the Eve app to unpair my phone from the Eve Extend. Made sure to patch all the firmware levels (v 1.1 of Eve Extend claims to improve Wifi connectivity). Finally I paired with HA. It worked first time. Event notifications not only work but the reaction from the Eve Motion are nearly as fast as my Hue motion sensors (normally within a second).
Given my chronic lack of time for HA at the moment this remains your best shot at “good” integration of Eve accessories into HA, but I could do with more field reports from people using this sort of setup.
See here.
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was just offered an Eve Energy switch, but reading all of the above, I am not sure if this is already supported in HA now? Switching and energy metering.
Could anyone here point me to how to go from here. It is Homekit compatible and operation via Wifi and direct via Bluetooth
thanks for any info you can share. I would start with Homekit controller and then how to proceed? is this mainly the wifi (since BLE is not supported)
As my main experience with smart switches is over Mqtt for the sensors, and api calls in shell_commands for the switching, I hoped this integration creates these sensors and switches automatically? Or does it still require some manual configurations.
I ask without trying first… as in: of course I tried to have a neek peek before this item arrives, but on installing the Homekit controller is starts scanning and doesn’t find any unpaired devices, so wont do anything.
Hello,
Most Eve products are based on BLE (which is the case of the Eve Energy Switch). Natively there is no solution for Home Assistant, as the Homekit controller is not supporting BLE at the moment.
There are some reports of success when adding a Eve bluethooth extender in the mix. (like the post above from jc2k)
Personally, I have stopped using Eve products for now. Maybe the new era of thread will open up new avenue to integrate with HA. Wait and see.
guess you’re right… found out that the eve switch was installed in a snap, which made me hopeful for its usefulness. would have thought that some central configuration would have taken care of being able to use it in the whole house. But I need to be within 10 meter or so with my mobile device to be able to use it, which makes it perfectly useless of course.
unless I can make a spare Apple TV have something to do again, would that register the eve switch so I can see it everywhere?
Hello 
HomePod (original and mini) and Apple TV serve as HomeKit extension for BLE devices such as EVE so yes it will help you out. if you have a very recent Eve switch it will be compatible soon with thread protocol (which is akin to zigbee) -> with an HomePod Mini (not the original) you’d probably see a near instant response time (let’s wait for firmware update and review)
yeah, anxiously awaiting the release for the new HomePod Mini here… have a full set of Google home devices, so probably will end up doubling that with the Pods. O dear. Loved the intercom function of those as showed in the recent Apple Event. Have made that myself now in the HA interface of my GH devices, which was quite an effort tbh 
Anyways, even thought the Eve energy switch is rather large, there’s a nice discount this weekend, so will probably grab a few extra and maybe even have a look at the Energy strip, which seems about the only strip around with individual smart sockets. Not sure if the energy metering on the strip is individual though.
Hi @Jc2k
Hope you’re doing well.
Can I kindly ask you about the progress of BLE support for HA?
Thanks
Pit
What little time I have for HA these days is spent on support, code review or fixing bugs. Or very small features. So I haven’t even thought about BLE support in a year, unfortunately.
(It doesn’t help that the Eve Extend has been working so well for me).
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Thank you for the quick reply.
In that case i am going to get one of the Eve Extend and try this out. Just wanted to know that, so that I don’t buy this for nothing.
Take care.