Minor annoyances with Bluetooth w(dongle) on Virtualbox VM

Installation
1

Hi All, I have some minor annoyances with Bluetooth, but I am not entirely sure if it is on the BT integration’s side or with the setup itself that I am running.

My setup:

  • Home Assistant OS installed on a VM in Oracle Virtualbox
  • Host hardware is a Dell Optiplex 5800 running Win11
  • BT dongle: ASUS BT-500

I am aware that VM needs to pass through the BT dongle so that HA can prioritize it over Windows. Normally this is achieved through unplugging and plugging in the dongle again after the VM has booted.

I have tried to eliminate the manual process by following the instructions in this post
Having the USB (Buetooth) working on VirtualBox - Hardware - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io), however the outcome is not exactly what I hoped for:

  1. The passthrough does take place, as I see in the VM menu that the dongle is showing up with the proper name and is connected to the VM, so that tells me that the batch file is successfully running and it is disabling/enabling the dongle as per design.
  2. In HA the base Bluetooth integration recognizes the dongle
  3. The Passive BLE integration however does not seem to see the device - I have the “Don’t use Bluetooth adapter” option ticked in, whilst I should have the device with its MAC address listed above it. I have tried reloading both the base BT and the Passive BLE integrations, no changes. The only thing that helps at this stage is to restart HA.

Can I tweak something to make the dongle available in HA seamlessly?

2

I don’t have an answer for your virtual setup but have you considered using an esp32 Bluetooth proxy instead?

It would eliminate conned ting Bluetooth directly to your HAOS hardware and with it he connection issue. It would also let you put one or more Bluetooth radios where you actually would use them…

3

I am not too familiar with ESP32, but I will try to look into it. How would it impact the HA BT and Passive BLE integrations? Currently every BT device I have (20+) is mapped under the Passive BLE integration, would I have to migrate them if I were to switch to ESP32 proxies?

4

You dontt have to migrate anything. It’s just like having multiple BT/BLE receivers all around the install.

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