New Google Home device tracker Component - Introduced in HA 0.83

Configuration
161

@ludeeus
I have been playing around with this device tracker, and it seems pretty cool.

I noticed one thing though…

When the tracker is enabled, all off my six GH speakers become “discoverable” (one in each room).

Looking at “ghlocalapi/bluetooth.py”, I can see that “scan_for_devices” makes it discoverable.

Is that really necessary?

I’m asking because I live in an area where people like to connect to random devices and mess around.

162

No, that should no longer be necessary.

163

hmm, I’ve setup ,my FitBit Flex2 and it works, ONLY if it is not already connected with the phone. When the Bluetooth is turned ON on my phone and the Fitbit in proximity of the phone, the FitBit is connected to the phone, therefore not accessible to HASS anymore… kinda’ defeats the purpose if I disconnect it to the phone. Is this use case the same for you @botts ?

164

You could add the sensor.time as an entity_id to the template sensor. That would force the sensor to re-evaluate every minute (see some example towards the bottom of the page)

Just make sure you also setup the sensor.time sensor in your config (I missed that step before and was frustrated for a long time…)

165

Mine is connected to phone as well. I think I had to turn off all day sync.

Here is my Fitbit setup

Screenshot_20190112-113713
Screenshot_20190112-1137131080×2340 307 KB

1 Like
166

Thanks for sharing, but the iPhone app doesn’t have these options except the All-Day Sync. At this point Fitbit with iPhone will only work if the BT is turned OFF on the iPhone, or perhaps if you disconnect the Bluetooth connectivity with the FitBit.

167

To contribute my experience… I have 2 Google Homes and 3 Google Home minis, a Google Pixel 2 XL, 2 Fitbit Charge 3s, and an iPhone SE. I very much wanted this to work, but it simply won’t reliably.

Things I have tried…

  • Pairing both phones with all 5 Google Homes
  • Unpairing my Fitbits
  • Keeping my Fitbits paired
  • Power cycling all my devices (… all 9 of them)
  • Power cycling the Home Assistant app & machine
  • Altering the default values for Device Trackers

Problems I continue to encounter…

  • GHs simply don’t update their status
    • I have left my phone across the room and tried all of the above
  • GHs don’t update consistently
    • I have 2 GH Minis in my bedroom on either side of the bed, but I can never get the LEFT one to pair
  • RSSI values have never shown up

It’s really disappointing, as this looks like a super cool component for a lot of reasons.

168

Hi all,

Been futzing with stuff and oh man, the possibilities…

But ultimately I concur. The only thing I could reliably track was my laptop while it was open.

FWIW, the rssi was accurate enough that I had some good room detection going with 3 GHM. If I could get things to reliably ping the GhM this would be the bees knees.

I was using some maths to figure out which it was closest to in a template_sensor config

169

I’m so excited by the concept but I also can’t get my phone to broadcast unless it’s in pairing mode. I have a Pixel 3 XL. I even tried a beacon simulator, but there Google home doesn’t seem to see that virtual beacon device. Even if it did, the MAC would change constantly.

Is it possible to get the Google home to see a btle tag with a uid? I think that’s the only way this will work :frowning:

170

I have one of these cheap BTLE tags and this works really well with Google Home

171

Oh cool. Which tag are you using? It is showing a static MAC address for you in known_devices?

172

I’m using two of these ones.

I’m tracking just one MAC for each.

173

I now see that my known devices keeps on growing and growing (now 84.000 lines). All Google Home entries.

In my device trackers I have below:

  - platform: googlehome
    host: 192.168.1.190
    rssi_threshold: -100
    interval_seconds: 8
    consider_home: 400
    new_device_defaults:
      track_new_devices: false
      hide_if_away: false

Any idea why this still keeps growing?

174

GHs keep on discovering new devices, or at least new MAC addresses which are changing on some of your devices. They get added to the known devices list but won’t show at the top of your home page

175

Is there a way to stop having new devices added to the known devices list?
I looked, but can’t seem to find it.
My known devices list get’s unusable with the google home tracking (which I would really like to use)

176

According to post above you should put this devicetracker at top. Trying that now. Just cleaner over 100k lines (!) from the known devices…

177

As far as I can tell from testing (unless I do something wrong) that means the new device shows up with track: false as standard. It does not seem to stop it from adding lines to known devices.

178

indeed, keeps adding devices. Arghh

179

Anyone had any luck stopping it from adding devices, it is adding them as false (as per @Tyfoon’s comment). But would rather it didn’t spam that file.

Whats peoples success with the tracker like, mine says “not home” a lot unless i trigger some event to occur for my BT to push out a signal. Anyone finding this to be more reliable (would appreciate tips).

I’m largely reliant on nmap at the moment but was hoping this would make it more robust.

180

Is any of this possible with Amazon Alexa devices too?