I have an Inkbird Bluetooth pool / hot tub thermometer. I installed it a few weeks back and it appeared in my list of devices under the Inkbird Integration. I also have a Bluetooth BBQ six probe thermometer which I use in my smoker.
The Bluetooth BBQ six probe thermometer has functioned flawlessly for almost a year now though I only use it once every few months. The Inkbird Bluetooth pool / hot tub thermometer configured fine and works, but appears to go offline or stop responding quite often. Every few hours in fact.
I downloaded an app called OpenMQTTGateway and manually connected the Inkbird Bluetooth pool / hot tub thermometer to Home assistant through this method, and it appears to stay connected and report without dropping with my first 24 hours of testing. I left the Inkbird Intergration in place so I can see that it drops offline while the OpenMQTTGateway stays working.
I do not really want to have separate ESP 32 devices on both ESPHome and OpenMQTTGateway but I do need this to report consistently from ESPHome. Any thoughts or suggestions on what I may need to do to make this work consistently?
I realize they are inexpensive which is why I have several indifferent formats as spares. However, this is basically a workaround for something that is not working properly and I am raising the flag so maybe someone might take a look. I suspect the issue is on the ESPhome side as at least so far, the OpenMQTTGateway solution does not appear to have missed a beat. A few more days of testing should confirm if it functions without issue.
Also, I found another post which implies that in ESPHome the IBS-TH2 works fine but the IBS-P01B does not and disconnects. In my system it discovers the P01B as a “IBS-TH2/P01B” implying to me that there is an assumption that they are the same or work the same and there may only be one definition for the two which I suspect may not be correct?
You are actually correct, and this one single decoder has been extended with the latest release to cover “IBS-TH1/TH2/P01B/ITH-12S” covering all various models of IBS-TH1s, IBS-TH2s, IBS-P01B and ITH-12S.
As Theengs Gateway is using the very same Theengs Decoder library as OpenMQTTGateway does, you should also see the same consistent results with the Theengs Gateway HA Add-On directly in your Home Assistant system if the devices are in good Bluetooth range of your HA system.
Alternatively you could also use some ESP32s with the esp32dev-ble-mqtt-undecoded binary as range extending proxies to send the undecoded raw data to the central Theengs Gateway HA Add-On for decoding.
So, my HA VM is on a server too far away from the IBS-P01B to work but I do have a ESP32 with OpenMqttGateway installed on in near the IBS-P01B. This is receiving data consistently. I installed the TheensGateway but I am not sure how to configure this so the data from the ESP32 gets to the TheensGateway??? There are a lot of items in the TheensGateway config set up I am unsure how to set??? Thoughts???
Once you install the esp32dev-ble-mqtt-undecoded OpenMQTTGateway binary on an ESP32 it will automatically send the undecoded raw data MQTT messages under the home/+/BTtoMQTT/undecoded topic, which the Theengs Gateway Add-on will automatically pick up
TIP
By default Theengs Gateway will listen to home/+/BTtoMQTT/undecoded, if you have several ESP32 gateways with OpenMQTTGateway undecoded, Theengs will pickup all of them and centralize the decoded BT sensor data in one place.
If you only have the affected one IBS-P01B it will work fine with the default BLE OpenMQTTGateway binary as you are doing now, doing the decoding on the ESP32 and sending the received properties through MQTT to HA. The above suggested setup with multiple ESP32s with OpenMQTTGateway undecoded and a central Theengs Gateway decoding is only really suggested if you want to use multiple ESP32s as proxies.
Thanks for the info. I actually thought it through a bit and figured it out. I was looking for data under the TheengsGateway topic using MQTT Explorer and there was none. Thanks so much for all your help,
covering all various models of IBS-TH1s, IBS-TH2s, IBS-P01B and ITH-12S.