I recently added, mostly as an experiment, an ESP32 with ESP32_ble_tracker and Bluetooth Proxy, planning to get rid of some shelly BLE gateway sticks.
Some time later (definitely not immediately, maybe 1-2 days) I started getting a “New devices discovered” with an “iBeacon Tracker” integration at the top to add. When I add it, the integration shows with no devices or entities.
Besides wondering why both the “discovered” and integration don’t give you any real indication of why it is there (i.e. where it is coming from)…
Is this the ESPHOME device to which I added ble_tracker?
Shouldn’t it appear here somehow? I.e. should there not be some path back from this page to the device that triggered it?
And if it’s not the ESPHOME device I created – what is causing this to show “discovered” newly?
I’ve done a lot of searching and generally people ask these about mystery devices that show up under the tracker integration – I’m asking about the integration itself showing up with no devices, where is it coming from?
By the way, I have a ton of BLE devices (Shelly door sensors for example). I have no i-anything, nothing apple related in the building, and also no android equivalents other than a Pixel 7 phone.
It’s the core BLE integration. It supports discovery.
I only added a BLE proxy last week, so am no expert but this is what I found:
I used the third party Bermuda BLE Trilateration integration to add my three garbage bin BLE beacons. Even though I am not actually room tracking this works exceptionally well to tell if my bins are in the drive or on the curb. I no longer get reminders to put the bins out if I have already done so as I can use the distances as a condition.
However, not long after adding these trackers I got the same discovered tracker you did shown above from the core BLE integration. I added one, it was a duplicate of my device already tracked by Bermuda and I saw no benefit to what I already had so I deleted and ignored the discovered devices from the core integration.
What you are seeing may be an ibeacon BLE broadcast that was received (even if only once) by your BLE proxy. Could be someone walking past your house.
My proxy is too far back from the street to have this happen but I do this in Bermuda anyway:
I have a similar option for the core bluetooth and it is set to auto-add.
So I think what you are saying is some device (but I can’t tell which?) saw a tracking device, so it prompted with the discovery of the iBeacon tracker, but by the time I added it the physical device that prompted this was no longer in range?
But I’ve deleted this iBeacon device and the instant I do, it prompts to re-add.
Is there no place that tells me at least which of my bluetooth capable devices are noticing the tracking device?
Here’s what i do with BT devices. I use them for room presence detection. Its very useful, especially if you have kids or partners who always loose keys, backpacks, devices, etc etc. You can quickly see where a device is or a set of keys and how far away it is from the BT hub in that room. Its also great for automating lights and such.
but by the time I added it the physical device that prompted this was no longer in range?
That sounds about right to me.
If it immediately re-prompts, that would imply that the device is currently nearby. But… the iBeacon integration (at least last I played with it, which was a little while ago) does some odd things at times, so it could be doing some ibeacon-integration-specific oddities.
If you do add the device, the “attributes” on the entity it creates will usually tell you what the source was, to tell you which bluetooth proxy heard it.
Oh… and on recent HA’s, the “Bluetooth” integration now lets you look at the advertisements received by each bt scanner. Go to settings, devices, bluetooth, and click CONFIGURE on one of the bt devices, then it will show you a table (with all) scanner’s advert results. This will help you work out if it’s actually recent data or not, and which bt proxy is closest to it.
Bermuda should only create devices if you tell it to via the configured devices in config, or if you add an entry to the private ble devices integration - it should never create a device (post-intsall) other than when the user has explicitly performed an action to add a device… IIRC.
Ooh… thanks for the reminder - I haven’t taken the bins out yet!
Last first - yes, I knew about that. I have a lot of pretty chatty blue tooth items, lots of little shelly things like window/door sensors. But that’s different from the iBeacon, right?
There’s nothing there, no attributes, no devices or entities under the “entry” that it puts in. I’m not even clear what that “entry” is, it’s not the integration itself (or is it?), it has no properties I can see. If I hit configure I can enter UUID for new allowed devices, I can reload it, and I can set it to enable newly added entities, and polling for changes. But nowhere here is there any clear association with this entry with a particular bluetooth device.
Maybe there isn’t such an association – maybe all bluetooth gateway devices contribute to what goes in this place, so that if the circumstances were right there would be a device here not associated with a particular blue took proxy but with whichever heard it?
I’d suggest that if you’re not trying to use the iBeacon integration, you remove it.
If you do want to track iBeacon devices, I’d use Bermuda (but I would say that, I wrote it). The iBeacon integration was… written with design goals that I would not have chosen. Consequently trying to work out what it’s doing, if you don’t actually require it to be doing anything, can be particularly frustrating.
Ah, I think only “connectable” devices might show up in the bluetooth advert monitor, as there are far fewer things there than I expected to see. At any rate, it wouldn’t show the beacon uuid so you’d have to identify it by MAC address, which might be difficult.
If you do decide to use Bermuda, it will list any seen iBeacons near the top of the “Select Devices” dialog in the configure flow.
I don’t use the devices, but have it there for testing and monitoring. The devices are just auto-added over time, opportunistically. Maybe the beacon it’s picking up doesn’t have a name, so iBeacon isn’t adding it as a device, but is triggering the config flow for discovery. It’s a bit odd though, because I thought Shelly devices transmit an iBeacon advert - but I might be wrong on that.
I left it there for a few days, nothing was added.
I deleted it, it immediately prompted to re-add, quick enough I suspect that the delete just queued it up to add, though I guess it is possible it saw another device but I added it and nothing appeared. Again.
So I ignored it.
My GUESS is that a neighbor, or a dog or cat, walked near enough to trigger it, and now it’s just stuck wanting to be added without giving me any info on how or why it was triggered. Kind of an odd design.
I don’t think it can be the shelly’s, they have been there for months. At least not in a straightforward way. I wonder if it’s the ESPHOME device on which I turned on the gateway – that’s the first such I created, and this came pretty soon afterwards (not sure exactly how soon).
I really don’t have any tracking devices, and don’t care, but thanks for the pointer to the alternative integration if I want to.
