Usually Inkbird Bluetooth thermometers, pool or otherwise, don’t respond with broadcasts with decodable data unless scanned actively. Passive scanning would not receive the manufacturerdata required for the decoding.
So both the HA Bluetooth integration and Theengs Gateway need to scan the Inkbirds actively, otherwise no data would be received at all.
As to if, how and why these active scans might sometimes possibly fail, causing passive only scanning resulting in the temperature chart drop outs, or if it might actually be device/firmware related, is hard to say.
If you have a PC or laptop with integrated Bluetooth or a spare ESP32 you could always install Theengs Gateway on PC or laptop or OpenMQTTGateway on the ESP32 and monitor them for a longer period. If they, with their different Bluetooth adapter, also fail it would definitely look like an issue with the P01B, if they work continuously then some further investigation with the HA integration would be in order. That’s how I’d try to start isolating the issue.
sounds like a weekend job… I can do any or all of those things. Might start with the Theengs Gateway on a laptop and move it around the house to see the results.
thank you for your help and advice on this.
If you also set up a separate MQTT broker on the laptop, just to isolate everything, and monitor it with MQTT Expolorer you can select the temperature and have it graph in MQTT Explorer.
Personally, I use an ESP32 with OpenMQTTGateway and pick up the MQTT in HA, and my two Inkbird TH1s have been steadily reporting their temperature and humidity for ages. While not P01B, they do use exactly the same decoding for the temperature.
So it might actually be something with the P01B, but a test like that will give you certainty.
I have just setup a RPi4 with the HomeAssistant OS and an Inkbird Bluetooth Pool Thermometer (IBS-P01B). I have multiple HA-installs for other purposes too, meaning I know it quite well already.
I came across this thread when googling this exact issue. These are the observations I have made so far:
The temp is updated all the time for a while, but after the temperature stabilizes, HA stops receiving new reading.
If I restart HA, it receivs new readings for a short period (suggesting it’s not really in a deep non-responsive state), before it stops again.
If I heat up or cool down the thermometer, making the temp change drastically, it also starts sending updates to HA for a short while before stopping again.
For now I use the built-in BT adapter, I have considered getting an external one, but that does noe appear to be the issue here?
So, did any of you get any closer to a more stable monitoring, or understand why it stops reporting?
Edit: I just setup the app on my phone to change the reporting interval and I noticed that the thermometer saves data back in time and reports on it once you open the app, if it was possible to capture this data by HA, this issue wouldn’t be as much of a pain?
I experienced the same problem. I stumbled across something called OpenMQTTGateway. I installed it on a spare ESP32 board I had around and configured an mqtt sensor to pull the Temperature and Battery % in Yaml. This appears to be working after a day or so but I will be testing this for a few days to be sure. Not sure I want separate ESP32 boards with different software installed to do what should be possible with ESPHome. I will try to post an update in a few days after testing.