New Google Home device tracker Component - Introduced in HA 0.83

Tyfoon · March 26, 2019, 10:07am

Which BLE tags are you using?

davefrooney · March 26, 2019, 10:20am

I bought some cheap ones. https://www.laptopsdirect.ie/iq-key-finder-black-bluetooth-4.0-iq-r633-key/version.asp

I think any will do.

Tyfoon · March 26, 2019, 10:22am

Thanks. I have some from China. They work fine, but battery seems to be the issue (approx 2-3 months)

davefrooney · March 26, 2019, 10:26am

I have been using these since July 2018 and the battery still reports as 40%

gurbina93 · March 27, 2019, 2:32am

I got the Track Pixel, they seem to occasionally advertise themselves but they aren’t very reliable. Anyway I managed to get my Galaxy Note FE to be discoverable by my Google Home Minis after a few days of trying and so far it works 101% for room presence, the only caveat is there is a 10-30 second delay as the Google Home presence detection component is broken, cannot set the device tracking properties such as interval_scan, track_new_devices, consider_home, etc so it’s running with defaults.

For a Samsung phone to work in this setup I had to enable:

Smartthings app -> settings -> allow phone presence detection
Settings -> connections -> more connection settings -> nearby device scanning
Settings -> connections -> location -> improve accuracy -> Bluetooth scanning

Alfiegerner · April 11, 2019, 12:21am

@gurbina93 - I can’t seem to get this working with my S10, have you paired your Google home to your phone? Any S10 users have this working without Bluetooth scanning screen on?

gurbina93 · April 11, 2019, 2:28am

Yes, you’ll need to pair it to your Google Home phones once and give a restart to HA. That did the trick for me.
If it’s not working you can try to unpair and retry the whole thing from scratch.
It definitely uses BLE for tracking so make sure it’s enabled in your Google Home presence config (default is track all types), maybe it will be working but of course your phone will show up as SourceGoogleHomeIPAdress_BLEdeviceMACaddress so good luck trying to find it if you live in a Condo, I have about BLE 20 entries at any time showing up as active, and the know_devices.yaml has grown all the way to 50-60 thousand lines after a couple of weeks.

Alfiegerner · April 11, 2019, 3:31am

Thanks for that, pairing appears to make no difference for me.My experience with or without pairing matches the symptoms noted above for android phone, ‘home’ presence only detected when bluetooth screen is open.

Wonder why it’s not working for me but is for you?

Do you have any other devices / automation / anything at all in your smart things app?

What’s your OS version? I have One UI version 1.1 Android version 9.

Bigrob8181 · April 11, 2019, 10:48pm

@Alfiegerner, Im in the same boat. I gave up shortly after this component came out, but saw some people had it working so i gave it another go. Still same results. Previously had a S8+ and now have a S10+. Followed this:

For a Samsung phone to work in this setup I had to enable:
Smartthings app -> settings -> allow phone presence detection
Settings -> connections -> more connection settings -> nearby device scanning
Settings -> connections -> location -> improve accuracy -> Bluetooth scanning

I can go to the device scanning on the google home and ONLY see my phone when on the bluetooth screen.

DavidFW1960 · April 11, 2019, 11:48pm

I am seeing this with my iPad and iPhone as well. It only is picking up the devices if I have opened the bluetooth settings which turns on discovery. I even linked my devices to the GH devices but they don’t auto connect either)

gurbina93 · April 12, 2019, 12:38am

I did try for days, tried everything… I even installed an app that runs in the background and advertises the phone as a BLE FindMe or iBeacon, the issue was then the MAC address changing every day…

What worked for me after days of fighting was turning on all of which I previously mentioned, unpairing my phone’s (only the Bluetooth) from every single Google Home, pairing my phone’s Bluetooth to every single Google Home and then giving HA a restart. I had exactly the same journey you guys had.

Alfiegerner · April 14, 2019, 4:01am

And the Mac address you’re seeing, is it your real Bluetooth Mac address or a randomised one?

gurbina93 · April 14, 2019, 4:18am

I just noticed it’s my real MAC

Alfiegerner · April 14, 2019, 9:20am

All I can say is that I’m quite envious No permutation of pairing, restarting etc will get my real Bluetooth Mac to show when not on Bluetooth screen (or shortly after)- I can see temporary randomised ones fine though.

luichi24h · May 2, 2019, 10:04am

Im trying to execute the script in hassio. I’m testing with the same as yours, included #end-of-my-devices# in the known_devices.yaml, created the script in config/ folder, put chmod +x with ssh, but when i run from Hassio Services the shell_command.clean_knowndevices (without Service Data) nothing happens. Get in home-assistant.log the following
Error running command: ‘/bin/bash /config/clean_knowndevices.sh’ return code: 1 NoneType: None

Any guess what’s happening?

davefrooney · May 2, 2019, 10:13pm

Can you run the command from the command line without any errors?

cozmik · May 4, 2019, 4:19pm

Great, now they’ll take it away from us. lol.

madmicio · May 10, 2019, 8:32pm

I configured the device tracker on three google home mini. what you see is only one honor 10. what is the problem?

Ricardo_Pinto · May 12, 2019, 4:19pm

Tonight my Google home mini started doing the thinking Lights sequence and never stopped.

I found out the problem was my hassio using it to Bluetooth presence. Went to the config file and comment the Google home tracking and it stopped.

Anybody else on the same situation? Now what?

onkytonk · May 15, 2019, 2:21am

How quickly are devices updated for you all with the new component?
I have delays as long as 5 minutes mostly.

Hoping an interval setting is added to the component.