Trying to up my presence detection game. With my phone, I get drop outs using BT which kicks me out of the house. I ordered a Pi Zero W for room assistant but I wanted to add my Gamin VivoActive3 watch as a tracker too. Should help I think. However, I don’t see the mac listed in known devices. On the watch itself, if I go into pairing, it says already paired to the phone. Was not sure if I needed to init pairing for it to show up. I did try a manual entry into the known devices, while this gives me the tracker in HA, it is marked not at home. So how do you add in something manually??
Bump this up to see if there is any thoughts. I am thinking that my watch does not broadcast?? the BT. Maybe it only does that during pairing session. I tried the manual addition again and still is not seen by my RPi. I just got some parts for setting up Room Assistant which will help in my scenario but I would like to get some sort tracking with the watch too.
The Apple Watch doesn’t really pair to devices other than an iPhone and e.g. headphone peripherals. You shouldn’t need to pair it though! At least room-assistant works completely without pairing. You can view the MAC from the settings > general > info. Scroll down to the Bluetooth MAC and put that in your room-assistant config, then you’re good to go.
EDIT: Just realized I mixed up and you have a Garmin, not an Apple Watch. Regardless, most of the above still is true… you just to find out a way to view the MAC. Note that the MAC advertised during pairing may also not be the real MAC (privacy feature). Usually there is a way to tell on the device or the corresponding app, maybe you can google it.
I pulled the mac off the device itself, Settings>System>about. However, checking known hosts I don’t see that mac listed. I guess maybe the device is not broadcasting or I can’t see the mac. I have quite a few items in my known hosts, nothing that seems to match via name. I pick up quite a bit of items from my neighbors.
In that case maybe I’m confused on what you’re trying to do. room-assistant won’t add to the known devices file, you do need to setup the device tracker manually in your config though (limitation of HA).
If you’re trying to use the Home Assistant Bluetooth integration: most devices only broadcast when in the BT/pairing menu and/or in pairing mode. Even then they might broadcast random IDs, which won’t help you much for tracking. Plus: when tracking from room-assistant and Home Assistant you might send multiple requests at the same time, which could cause things to behave weird. room-assistant has its own logic for preventing this, but it only works within your room-assistant cluster. I would recommend to just use the device trackers supplied by room-assistant instead of running both at the same time.
mainly I was trying to get HA on my RPi 4 to track phone AND watch. I think that would help with reliable detection I am in the process of sorting out MQTT so I can add in a Pi Zero W with Room Assistance on it. So far I have not had luck. But I figured I would try to get it in the main instance for tracking. So much for easy.