Recommended USB Bluetooth Adapter

I’m using Home Assistant Yellow and would like to add a USB Bluetooth adapter, preferably with an external antenna.

When reading the docs under:

The recommended HIGH-PERFORMANCE ADAPTERS are:

CSR8510A10 - however this is a quite old chipset with Bluetooth 4.0 only (we are at BT 5.3, BT 5 has much increased range) and apparently there are many cheap adapters pretending to be a CSR8510A10. Most of the products given in the list are hard to find.

BCM20702A0 - also a quite old chipset (I can find issues from 2014 with a simple google search) and Bluetooth 4.0 only.

I’d like to know if there is a modern Bluetooth 5.x USB adapter which can be recommended for use with Home Assistant Yellow?

Thanks!

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This may not answer your question but…

I found bluetooth worked much better when I abandoned my bluetooth dongle and used a bluetooth proxy instead.

ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy

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I have a bluetooth proxy based on ESP32 running already. Unfortunately my SwitchBot curtain devices are offline a lot in HA. I was hoping a fix USB dongle would work better.

I just purchased an Asus USB-BT500 which is on the recommended list. I have not used it yet.

My Yellow has bluetooth on the pi command module but it continually drops in and out. I presume that I will have to disable it. Does anyone know if how to do this?

I have also had problems with Switchbot so I am hoping that an external usb will help.

I’ve updated the ESP32 bluetooth proxy to the latest esphome version, and also the switchbots to the latest firmware. Now it seems more stable and reliable!

I also have a few Shelly Plus (with the Bluetooth in Active mode), which I updated to the latest version. Maybe this did the difference?

Anyhow, I will keep an eye on the situation, but for now it seems I will not need a USB BT adapter.

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Thanks. I will give that a go. ESP32 bluetooth proxy used to be not working for switchbots and I ended up with a medium performance BT 5.1 adapter with 10 seconds switchbot control delay .

What Bluetooth dongle did you find to use they is recognized by HA yellow?

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Hi,
Can you tell me how to have the integration that I want to run use the BT adapter of my choosing rather than the built-in one?
Thanks

I didn’t have HA yellow. Just a x86 virtual machine running HAOS.

I purchases the unsupported: UGREEEN CM591 (ATS2851) by mistake and found it to be working fine. It is recognized immediately by HA.

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Just wanted to let people know that I bought this Adapter off Amazon (for $20.99) and it works great:

Long Range Bluetooth 5.3 Adapter for PC USB High Gain 5dBi 100m/492ft Antenna for Desktop Laptop Bluetooth Dongle for Mouse, Keyboard,Speakers,Supports Windows 11/10/8.1,Plug and Play

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BRNC16LF

It setup really easily and I connected an aranet4 to it and everything is working as expected.

Some people were asking if there were any Bluetooth 5.3 adapters, so I thought I’d mention that this one worked for me in case others ask in the future.

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What HW are you using with this adapter? I’m seeking a Bluetooth LR dongle which will work with rPI HA OS.

I’m using Home Assistant Green.

Same here, Amazon wasn’t too forthcoming about the exact model type, other than it being a UGREEN Bluetooth 5.3 adapter. The USB device ID 10d7:b012 points to CM591. That turns out to be on the unsupported list on the wiki, but it loaded fine on Armbian with a 6.6.31 kernel. It’s talking to two Mi sensors now. HA Docker instance. Seems at least from kernel 6.1 a quirk is available to handle the Actions Semi ATS2851 chip the CM591 is based on (link).

I’m not sure how to collect logs on dropped packets etc, from what I can tell, HA doesn’t seem to have any issues with the CM591 dongle for now.

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I purchased the same one and it’s reading in HA as Actions general adapter. Is that the right name?
It seems to be scanning but doesn’t work with switchmate component. using bluetoothctl it can’t connect to any BT device.

What is currently a good supported usb Bluetooth 5.3 adapter? As CSR8510A10 is only 4.0 and I am using Intel build in adapter which is unstable. I would like to buy a good alternative.

That is the expected name yes:

$ lsusb|grep 10d7
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 10d7:b012 Actions general adapter

It works fine here with Mi temperature and Flowercare sensors, but battery status on the latter is not reporting at all, despite one of them being within a meter of the dongle.

I have tried ATS2851 based ones on supervised installation (with stable 6.1.0 kernel and XanMod 6.10.8 kernel) unfortunately my CubeTouch fingerbots do not even connect with it. My Govee over thermalmeter works without any problem though…

Thank you. I searched and found this thread on the web. I have a HA Green also and got a few SwitchBot Tilts for my blinds. I looking forward to the Amazon order. :+1: