Sorry if this is in the wrong place.
First off, I run a medium Proxmox cluster at home and want to get rid of the Pi’s I have running. Power isn’t the issue. DR is the issue. I had a power outage 2 weeks ago and the pi system did not come up right. The SD card failed. I restored and it is fine at the moment. Proxmox is on battery backup.
The question is that I have 4 Bluetooth Switchbot plugs distributed in one room. The pi is in that same room and it works just fine. How do I replace the bluetooth connection the pi is providing so that I can use them with proxmox?
I do have a Shelly Plus 1 dry contact relay in there, but have been completely unsuccessful in using the bluetooth on it to connect the 4 Switchbot AC plugs I have. Prior to trying I did not know about BLE, but now I know a little more than nothing about it.
I also have a Pi 4 8gig as a touch screen to give you the status of various sensor readings and control but it is located 20 feet away and there is a 1.5" sheet rock firewall between them and it does not see anything bluetooth when I reset a switchbot. I kinda want to keep them because I can move them anywhere to temporarily control things. I know I can reprogram them with ESPhome, but would like to just leave them how they are.
Thanks for the thoughts and idea’s!
Yeah, the Shellys unfortunately don’t allow for an active connection (which you need, to send data back and forth, not just listen to BT broadcasts). BT Proxies are an option, but they only allow for 3 simultaneous active BT connections (so you’d need two and not sure how well they’d divvy up the connections).
I know Switchbot has a hub, it might work well if all you need BT for in that area is for the Switchbot devices. I assume it can handle more than 3 at a time, since it’s their product (but I’ve never used it).
What I ended up doing was purchasing a Kinivo Bluetooth 4.0 usb BTD400 adapter.
- Before you start run lsusb on your proxmox host to get a list of devices.
- Plug in the device and run lsusb again. This time finding the new entry. Mine happened to say bluetooth, yours may not.
- Copy the ID number 0a5c:21e7 (Yours will be different) from the lsusb output. Only the number.
- Shutdown HA vm
5 When off, go into the hardware and add usb device, then In the dialog box, click on the “Use USB Vendor/Device ID” option. Then paste in your number and click add button.
- Boot up the VM.
- Go into Integrations and remove bluetooth, only if it was in there before like mine.
- Reboot HA.
- When it comes up open the HA webpage and it will have a notice that it found something new. Configure it. I did not select the scan option, you may want to.
- When it completes, reboot again.
When it comes up, your existing devices should work. Mine did any way. I am shocked at the range of this and it making it through several sheetrock walls.
Just a note, I have my HA VM pinned to a single node on my proxmox servers. If the node goes down I will have to physically move the bluetooth adapter & the VM to the node where proxmox could start it up again…
This note is for those that follow. The 8.2+ version of Proxmox, so far, has an issue where the vm stops communicating with the bluetooth adapter as soon as a backup is started. However if you reboot the vm, it does not fix it. You have to shutdown the vm, wait a couple minutes and boot it back up. Then it is happy again.
I ended up putting in a cron job to shutdown the vm every night at midnight and then boot it up in an hour, after the backups have finished.