I today watched this awesome youtube video by Everything Smart Home about using ESP32 and ESPresence to do device localization and room based presence detection in Home Assistant. I wanted to explore playing with room based presence detection for a while a decided to pull the trigger on a bunch of ESP32 boards.
Just this evening, while researching something completely different I ended up scrolling through the (unofficial) Google Home Local API documentation and the part about scanning for Bluetooth devices caught my eye:
https://rithvikvibhu.github.io/GHLocalApi/#operation/GetScanResults
I might be oversimplifying this, but if I’m not completely wrong then the result of this query should be enough to do the same thing ESPresence effectively does with a bunch of dedicated ESP32 controllers. Given that I already have roughly a dozen different Google Home devices throughout my home, that would make the use of dedicated ESP32 based “Bluetooth scanners” superficial.
My questions to this community:
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does it seem like GetScanResults might be able to effectively measure and track to location of various personalized Bluetooth trackers like phones and smart watches throughout a home or am I missing something prohibitive here?
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has anyone ever looked into using Google Home Local API in this way or is there even a project that I am unaware of that taps into this functionality?
Thanks,
Daniel