Use ESP32 for Bluetooth room presence detection

ESPHome
22

I use Espresence and like it very much. You can use any esp32 but, some are better than others depending on if you plan to use them for more than just a dedicated BT hub that tracks devices/BT beacons.

Me personally, I prefer to use them solely as BT hubs and want the smaller esp32 boards for this. I mostly use esp32 D1-mini but, there are others. You can track people(their devices) or BT beacons. For example I have a beacon on my dog and im alerted if shes outside and then unavailable as that usually means she got out of the fence! You can use them on your keys to track your car if it doesnt have BT and you can simply track yoir keys if you lose them and it will tell you which room they are in and how far away they are from the BT hub in that room. Its very useful for sure!

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1 Like
23

Sheesh…this is hard. ESPHOME installed. ESP32 device flashed and online. This in itself is amazing this all worked so far.
Now what? I’m sooo lost…editng the yaml file with what?

24

Nothing to edit. Espresence is a different firmware similar to Esphome is its own firmware. There is documentation/guides on their website that explains this stuff and how to set it up. It integrates with HA and isnt difficult at all.

You will need to install/setup MQTT in HA. Look for Mosquito and install that.

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25

Just to check: did you install ESPhome or ESPresence?

If it’s ESPhome you just need to have the following included in the devices YAML

esp32_ble_tracker:
  scan_parameters:
    active: false

bluetooth_proxy:
  active: true

… and obviously have it connected to your wifi and included into Home Assistant via the ESPhome Integration.

That’s it for the ESP itself.

Setup the Bermuda Integration as per the docs.

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26

Do you need to define binary_sensor configs for the devices or should they “just work” with that YAML for an ESPhome device?

27

You don’t need to setup anything else in ESPhome, just Bermuda.

28

Yes, so I just found out. I was trying to trouble shoot why I couldn’t seem to get my EP1s to work with it. But it turned out to be a configuration error. They are working great now that I found my problem :slight_smile:

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29

What configuration changes did you need to make to the EP1?

30

Needed to make sure I was on the latest configuration from the website via USB. The version of the firmware that was available when I first got mine didn’t have bluetooth proxy enabled and to get a firmware with it enabled worked requires a USB install because it changes some of the firmware filesystem layout.