I have an Inkbird IBS P01 thermometer that is outside and I have setup an ESP32 flashed as a bluetooth proxy inside on the other side of a window to the sensor.
When it works this is great but it regularly stops reporting or shows up as unavailable. When it does it never comes back
The only way I can seem to get it back when it get into either state is to delete the Inkbird integration and restart HA and which point the device is identified and can be setup again.
Just restarting the ESP32, reloading Inkbird integration, restarting HA alone doesn’t work and the device then just shows up as unavailable.
Even deleting the Inkbird integration for the P01 (leaving another instance for a different Inkbird bluetooth sensor) and restarting HA doesn’t bring the device back to life.
Is there any way I can improve this? Ideally stopping it disappearing in the first place would be ideal but even being able to get the device to appear again if it does disappear would be helpful
I reset this last night again and since 8pm last night it worked fine right up until 10:20 this morning at which point the temperature was back up to where it should be and the heater will have turned off and the temperature will be pretty stable.
I know however that the temperature will drop in a few hours, the heater will kick back in etc. The sensor will not report update again and if I restart HA it will show up as unavailable.
Is this something around the device only sending updates when the temperature changes so if it is stable there are no updates. This is triggering some timeout and then device is just being forgotten so later updates when the temperature actually has changed aren’t being picked up?
I do have another Inkbird Bluetooth sensor (an iBBQ one) that doesn’t seem to have the same issue (temperature is stable but device is still updating)
I have a very similar issue though I’m not using Bluetooth Proxy with ESP32 (though going to try this to see if that’s my issue, but after reading your post it doesn’t seem to be the issue). I’m direct with Bluetooth dongle (working great with other devices so I know this isn’t the issue) and the HomeAssistant Bluetooth add-on.
I get very similar results, works during increase/decreases but doesn’t change, or stops updating, once temps seem to stop changing for awhile.
Did you ever figure out a fix here?
I’m looking at the app from the company and it appears the device (my case it’s the Pool Temp device but behaves similar to the outdoor temp device from jameson_uk) puts itself in an offline mode and wakes up upon request from the app. It might be the devices are designed to only provide continuous data for a period of time then they sleep till requested by the app again.
jameson_uk - oddly enough i added the app to my phone and loaded on the device. this woke it up and started reporting the data to HomeAssistant again. Honestly not sure how to fix this issue if the device goes to a battery save sleep and only wakes up upon request from the app.
I’m wondering if you have active scanning enabled, but that should already be required for the sensor to be picked up in the first place. Maybe something to double check though.
@DigiH I have active scanning enabled. I installed Theengs Gateways but not sure where the reports are housed or how to pull that information. The documents with the add-on are lacking some clear instructions.
I downloaded the Inkbird app and connected to the device from my phone. I change the reporting interval from 2 minutes to 10 minutes and it seems to have improved things a bit. I have now been able to maintain nearly 24 hours of temp reporting (most I saw earlier was maybe 8-12 hours).
I’ve got some ESP32 (only have ESP8266 in the house) scheduled to be delivered sometime this week. Going to try the Bluetooth Proxy to see if that changes anything with a more frequent update.
Theengs Gateway (Add-On) reports the values (and the auto-discovery) via MQTT, and can also be monitored separately with an external app like MQTT Explorer. Apologies, I somehow always assume everyone is already using MQTT for something or other
The documentation for the separate Theengs Gateway, on which the Add-On is based upon, is more detailed.
@DigiH
Great! thank you for that information. I have MQTT broker running so once I was told where to look I could easily find the data. Here is one of the recent received data log. Looks like signal strengh if strong. I have a large number of these showing up and all are between -56 / -64
I’m away from the house so I can’t reset the device… BUT looks like I was getting regular updates till around 8:44:59. Updates were about ever second or so, I have now lost updates from the device and it seems I the temp probe stopped sending messages. It’s been about two hours since I’ve received a message from the device.
I suspect these devices are only designed to report data for a certain period of time then they hit a deep sleep mode. Maybe it stays this way (stops reporting data at all) if it hasn’t communicated with the app. Not sure if this is possible?
I set up to start listening for TIME_BETWEEN but I don’t think I’ll have any data till I’m able to work on resetting the sensor again when I’m home.
I’m wondering if this might be a more recent firmware related issue/feature, as from previous users of the P01B with Theengs Gateway and/or OpenMQTTGateway I’ve never heard this to happen.
The only possible solution I could think of, would be so send regular BLE connection commands to read some GATT characteristic, which could possibly keep the device awake, similar to a connection with the app.
care to see some even stranger stuff? The device started reporting again… BUT no data reports in MQTT logs! I can’t post both images on one chat so I’ll reply with the MQTT log.
Yes, the computer is running Debian and doesn’t have Bluetooth on motherboard. Only Bluetooth adapter on the computer is a stick: Sena UD100-G03
I might go the way of @jameson_uk and move to RF or custom MQTT homebuilt device.
I was just wondering, as it’s very strange that the Gateway MQTT messages didn’t have the updated values, as Gateway only published to MQTT if and when it actually receives a BLE broadcast, so somehow these should mean that it did receive broadcasts with the older temp values, for some very strange reason.
I’ve been reading on Passive BLE. Seems like some others have had similar issues with the Inkbird device.
The active scanning on Passive BLE seems to solve some of the issues on Inkbird devices.
Is there a way to do an active scan or pink through the HA Bluetooth integration? I haven’t found a way.
Not sure if anyone else has these same feelings but it seems very hard to diagnose issues with Bluetooth integration as there are so many different parts that can have issues. maybe I’m just more comfortable with Zigbee and Z-wave.
