New Google Home device tracker Component - Introduced in HA 0.83

gian · March 1, 2019, 5:16am

is there a way to at least get rid of the over accumulated tracked devices that my google home picked up? i have over 50 of them lol

marmar63 · March 7, 2019, 2:16am

Same! If I understand it correctly, some of the MAC addresses for bluetooth are generated and re-generated, rather than being solely hardcoded. If that’s the case and we have no way to flush, this can get silly quick!

gian · March 7, 2019, 3:14am

I ended up finding out. You can just delete them from your know_devices.yaml file.

marmar63 · March 7, 2019, 5:42pm

That was the first place I looked they didn’t appear to be there. I’ll have to go try again I suppose…

update:
I found them the second time around. instead of using Atom as I had been to edit the file, I opened in Notepad, and there it was at the bottom, all piled up instead of nicely formatted. I cleaned it all out to start over.

surge919 · March 13, 2019, 1:24am

I have a Galaxy Note 8 and this doesn’t work for me.
There are about 12 Google Home/Minis around my house and only one picked it up. It found the device but about 3 minutes later it switched to Away mode and stayed there.

baz_12312 · March 14, 2019, 3:08pm

Strange only one picked it up. Did you try going to the web address to see what it can see? http://home_ip_address:8008/setup/bluetooth/scan_results

vjmindlab · March 14, 2019, 3:40pm

Are you on the latest Android for the Note 8?

surge919 · March 14, 2019, 9:17pm

I’m on the Pie beta.

I have 2 other phones in the house… a Moto Z Play and a Moto G6 Play.
They also don’t show up in the list.
http://home_ip_address:8008/setup/bluetooth/scan_results

davefrooney · March 21, 2019, 12:07pm

I have a bit of a workaround for removing the build up of unknown devices in known_devices.yaml.

I add a line (#end-of-my-devices#) to the file and keep all the devices I want to track above this. I then create a script in /config call clean_knowndevices.sh with the following

#!/bin/sh
/bin/sed -i '/#end-of-my-devices#/q' /config/known_devices.yaml

This will delete anything below the matching pattern

You will need to do the following to make it executable

chmod +x /config/clean_knowndevices.sh

You can then use the shell_command to to start the script and create an automation to run it periodically

shell_command:
  clean_knowndevices: /bin/bash /config/clean_knowndevices.sh

p0lar · March 21, 2019, 10:15pm

works great. Thanks

DavidFW1960 · March 21, 2019, 10:16pm

I’m guessing you’re not using hass.io?

p0lar · March 21, 2019, 10:17pm

I am. just modded the script a bit to use the correct dirs

DavidFW1960 · March 21, 2019, 10:19pm

Thanks I’ll have a go at doing that

davefrooney · March 21, 2019, 10:23pm

I am using hassio

DavidFW1960 · March 21, 2019, 11:01pm

Works. Nice!

gurbina93 · March 22, 2019, 8:57pm

Did you manage to fix it? Mine shows up only when I am in the Bluetooth settings page, enabling the “Nearby device scanning” didn’t help.

Mahko_Mahko · March 23, 2019, 12:08am

This is awesome to have a Mi band 3 tracker…

Edit: Actually, I can’t seem to see mine. Did you do anything extra?

Edit 2: Cancel that. It showed up. All good! Sweet.

gurbina93 · March 23, 2019, 11:27am

@vjmindlab @surge919
For all the people using Samsung devices, here’s the fix:

You gotta go to the Smartthings app and enable this setting:
-Allow Phone Presence Detection (it uses BLE)

gurbina93 · March 24, 2019, 4:57am

Any progress on the random MAC advertisements?
It seems the BLE framework is designed to randomize MAC addresses every time it starts, there’s no possible way to maintain a fixed address. Now my issue is that the only thing that remains constant is one of the attributes, “name”.

As it is it seems impossible to track BLE devices as the MAC address will keep changing, any workaround on how to keep track of them? Perhaps a template to dynamically select the tracker based on the name attribute? And then another template to know in which area it is (to which GH it is connected to) based on entity name? IP addresses on GH are already part of the name which could be filtered just like the monster card does.

Going for the monitor seems like an overcomplicated option and I’m still wondering how to do indoor positioning with it. I would need to have a few raspberry pi zeros around and then compare the results coming from each one to see to which one I’m the closest to, is that correct?

Any experience with BLE tags? Same issue? Or will it remain constant until you change the battery?
I was trying FIND and FIND3. FIND I found it very precise and supports MQTT but this integration in Zanzito does not seem to work anymore.

davefrooney · March 26, 2019, 8:47am

I use the BLE tags on my keys to detect presence. I don’t think the MAC address changes on these but it might do after a battery change. The battery lasts 12 months and I’ve been using for 7 months and the MAC address has remained consistent.