I’ve got a couple of little Xiaomi thermometer/humidity detectors which work fine over Bluetooth with my HA running on Raspberry Pi. But I like to use them from time to time in different locations around the house - and it’s a large house with thick stone walls, so there are huge areas of the house which are out of Bluetooth range.
It’s not really worth getting a separate device as a Bluetooth repeater, but my wife and I both have Windows PCs which are on most of the time, and are normally positioned in opposite areas of the house which would provide good coverage.
So I wondered if anyone had developed (or might develop?) a Windows program which could scan for Bluetooth devices and transmit the data over the LAN to a Pi (or whatever) running HA.
Alternatively, I do have a (very) old Raspberry Pi that isn’t doing anything, so I wonder if that could be used in some way as a Bluetooth repeater.
So let me get it straight: you want to use a 50W-200W consuming device to repeat low energy bluetooth signals, because adding a $8 costing, 0,5W consumung device would be overkill? .
Just joking a bit of course, but with some reason. Even if the PC’s are mostly on, having them run a service in the background instead of sleeping, or you keeping them on for a bit longer because otherwise your bluetooth devices will be unavailable, negates any reserve you might have against buying an esp. For me it is just the opposite: I find other uses for the same esp’s. For instance, I have a few occupancy sensors annex bluetooth proxies.
You could for instance flash an esp based smart socket with a proxy. I bet there’s something you can make smart in the neighborhood. Suggestion: use it to monitor power on the PC . The esp proxy software is there, and it does exactly what you suggest: use other devices instead of dedicated ones.
Thanks for your reply - and OK, point understood - but I work from home, my PC is on for at least 12 hours every day, and the readings I want to get from the Xaiomi device are just for general interest. One reading a day would suffice. It is of absolutely zero consequence if the readings were unavailable all night long, or indeed all weekend long.
An $8 device would still need to be plugged in somewhere and it’s an old house without a lot of spare mains sockets - so you could add an adaptor to that, plus the general clutter of yet another gadget.
But most importantly, I am not particularly technically-minded, so when you suggest I could “flash an esp based smart socket with a proxy” - I’m afraid I don’t even know what that sentence means, let alone how you would do it! And I’m afraid I don’t really want to learn - I’ve got a simple HA setup which seems to work and I don’t really want to make it too complicated.
So I just wondered whether it was possible to relay the Bluetooth signal through my PC. Evidently not! But if there’s a plug-and-play BT repeater that would work (and is available in France), then I could consider that.
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. The esp proxy software is there, and it does exactly what you suggest: use other devices instead of dedicated ones.