Olimex POE Bluetooth proxy does not work without calling home

ESPHome
1

Hello. An esphome newbie here.

I bought the ESP32-POE-ISO-EA from Olimex and flashed its firmware at Ready-Made Projects — ESPHome. Everything seemed to go well. I attached the device to my home automation network (which doesn’t have access to the internet). When you power up the device it will respond to telnet on port 6053 for a little while. It gets slower and slower to respond and ultimately stops responding altogether. Home Assistant would auto-discover the device but the integration doesn’t work.

By chance I happened to see in my opnsense edge router logs that the bluetooth proxy is calling home to github cdn. So just to test it out I allowed the bluetooth proxy to call home and it started working. The integration in Home Assistant worked right away.

This is pretty strange. I thought that most people would have their home automation network set up in a way that it’s isolated from the internet.

Just taking a wild stab here but is the bluetooth proxy looking for updates? TBH I don’t even know if Home Assistant can do OTA updates on esphome devices so it might be useful to get updates over the internet. But the device not working at all unless it can call home over the internet is a bit over the top.

2

Here is the source of what you installed (I guess):

It uses github at installation time, and uses https://firmware.esphome.io/bluetooth-proxy/esp32-generic/manifest.json at runtime to check for updates

3

I think it’s this one: firmware/bluetooth-proxy/olimex-esp32-poe-iso.yaml at a7db5f3dde6be30ebfd0ad2543a772a546433a45 · esphome/firmware · GitHub

But yea the same firmware source is there, too. That must be it. Thanks.

I suppose it’s splitting hairs but firmware.esphome.io is an alias for github and has all its addresses in a github cdn network.

4

You can adopt the esp and then remove the links to GitHub. You won’t get the updates when the source is changed on GitHub. (eDITED)

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