EASY Bluetooth Proxies in Home Assistant! Increase the range of your passive Bluetooth devices!

today we're going to talk about bluetooth proxies what happens if you have your home assistant instance in a back closet of the backus part of your house well you're not going to get bluetooth out to everything that you need so with bluetooth proxies such as an esp32 board or something else like that you're able to get those bluetooth signals back into your home assistant instance regardless of where that instance is actually sitting so today we're going to play around with it and get a little bit of an overview of what the proxies are and how you can set one up with an esp32 board [Music] so before we get started doing the actual work of creating a proxy and using it let's talk a little bit about what's going on here in the last release which was 2022.8 um home assistant red introduced bluetooth integration that was the first step in what's going on now which is the support for multiple bluetooth bluetooth adapters and esp home devices acting as bluetooth proxies so why do you need a bluetooth proxy well this picture kind of sums it up for us if we take a look here we look at this house if your home assistant instance is down here in the basement and you have something up here that's bluetooth enabled it's very unlikely that the distance between here and all of these floors will allow you to connect directly to home assistant so the way you do that is you throw in a couple of bluetooth proxies and they show those here bluetooth believe it or not will go through floors in fact my farthest away device is in the garage and it actually works for from where i'm at here which is about it's two floors and about five walls between here and there so it will work but for reliability and for those areas where it won't work you throw in a proxy for guaranteed coverage so that's what's going on with the bluetooth proxies and why you need them one of the biggest uses of this is temperature sensors and stuff like that where you have a sensor that's broadcasting a temperature or humidity or something else again far far away from where your home assistant instance is you want to be able to pick that signal up and bring it in the home assistant and that's what we're doing here with the proxies so all you have to do to get a proxy up and running is to go over to the bluetooth proxy installer website which is this website right here and we'll come back to that in just a minute you can install the proxy strip directly from your browser on some supported devices now these proxies are limited to passive data now what is passive data versus active data passive data means that the device such as a thermometer or something like that is sending out a beacon with data every so often the home assistant proxies currently will listen for that data and send it back to home assistant what it's not doing is an active connection and an active connection is when you would send out a query to a device to get more information from that device that is currently not supported in this version of the home assistant proxy however as noted on their site here that is something that will be coming in a future release so then you can actually query devices and pick up more information from those devices so the integrations that are using the proxy will already do this stuff regardless of which way it's set up all you have to do is just install the proxy so once they get the active connections going well you'll be able to use those right away most integrations now support using the adapter with the best signal to connect devices that need an active connection so extension cables usb ethernet extenders or usb ip coupled with an additional bluetooth adapter can significantly extend your active connection range so in addition to all of that of course we talked about this in the release video a while back bt home is now available in home assistant anything that has a bt home packet will be automatically discovered by home assistant and those devices typically can typically can run over a year on a single battery okay so let's talk about what i'm going to do today so today we're going to use a use our esp32 board and you can find the link to this stuff on my website it's an affiliate link if i can get that to focus come on you can do it this is just an esp board that has bluetooth capability and wi-fi capability it's got a little more to it than just uh that but it is a board that we're going to use today and i'm going to plug that in to just into my pc using just a standard usb cable so we'll do that there and so now it's powered up you can see the little light on there and we're going to leave it alone we don't have to touch it or do anything else with it we're going to do everything else in the actual software so if we go over here and we talked about this bluetooth proxy page this is where you actually install the software onto an esp board and you have three different choices currently there are some choices that are available that require you to do a bit more uh hands-on with the actual device or the hardware to make it work so these are the easiest to use right now the generic esp32 which is what i just showed you there is an m5 stack that's available it's an esp32 board that has a case on it and a little usb adapter right there and then this is the olam x esp32 powered over ethernet this is a poe powered device this one also allow you to do a bluetooth proxy we're going to stick with the generic esp32 today and i'm going to just click on the connect button here it's going to ask me if i want to connect to it and i'm going to choose the com port that it's currently connected to connect it right here it's going to find it and then it's going to ask me what i want to do well today i'm going to install an esp32 generic on here it erases everything on the board so if this is a board you're doing something else with you may not want to go this route there is a way to install this without going this way we're going to do a fresh install so we'll click that it'll take a couple of minutes for that to occur and while it's doing that we'll step aside and then we'll come back when it's all finished while that is installing let's just take a minute if you can while you're waiting go over to my youtube channel or you're on my youtube channel but hit that subscribe button down below and if you're not a channel member uh please join the channel i help support what i do here as well and there's other ways to support me i have a website that you can find in the description down below as well to see what other things i'm doing and all that jazz so let's see what's going on over here we're at 95 installed uh almost done so now it's wrapping it up and the installation is complete all right so that's step one it has now installed generic esp32 firmware on your device so we'll click on next you're going to set up a wi-fi network for this particular type of board if you're using a poe powered or something else this is a little different but for the esp32 boards i'm going to connect this to my wi-fi network so we'll connect connect it there and get it all set up now the device is connected to the network and it's going to ask me to add it to home assistant so i'm going to click on that button next and it's going to do the my home assistant link so my dot home assistant dot io is where it's going to go whatever you have connected in this year or set up in this url right here is the device it's going to go to the instance so if you're doing more than one instance make sure you edit this to the instance you want to connect this device to and i will click on open link here do i want to set up esp home the answer is okay yes i do i've run into this a couple times where it's asking me for the ip address of the node so i believe i know that so we're going to try it if you don't know the ipa address of the node and it doesn't always ask this but for some some cases it does you'll have to go to your router and you have to figure out which device it's actually connecting to or what ip address it is so then in my case this is 209 let me put 209 here and i'll submit it and now it says it's already configured the reason why is i've already messed with this before when i was playing around with it so you will not see that you will probably see it say that it got configured in any case a successful message is a successful message regardless of how you've done this all right so now we can go over to esp home and take a look at esp home this assumes you have esp home installed on your home assistant instance you can see here that this is the esp32 bluetooth proxy zero one zero eight t4 which i guess is the mac address of it um yes that's the mac address of this particular device so now what i want to do is adopt it adopting the esp32 will create an esp home configuration for this device so i'll put it on here in under esp home this is a way for you to install updates and customize the firmware it will be configured to connect to the wi-fi network stored in your secrets which is up in here so what it's basically going to do is it's going to configure it so that you can control it and manage it through esp home that is not absolutely always necessary but in my case i want to do that so i can can have an overview of all my esp devices so i'll click on adopt and now it needs to uh finish creating the installation on the device and we'll do this wirelessly since it's already connected to the wireless network and you can see that it's compiling here and getting everything ready the time it takes to do this will depend on how many packages that need to be compiled uh how many times you've done this before on this particular device or on esp home if it already has everything it needs it will just go ahead and prepare it and upload it to your device and then it'll try to connect to it once it's all done and if you have a successful connection you'll see this information here where you have a wi-fi signal and all of the rest of it that goes on with it so essentially you're done now uh you also connected to home assistant here so you can go ahead and stop that and now you have a proxy up and running so what you do next depends on what you're going to do with this now i'm going to use a few of these me thermometers and these are the ones that broadcast out passively temperature and humidity and this is what i'm going to do in three different locations in my house i've got these really cheap thermometers i'm using these right here and then this bluetooth setup that i have this proxy allows me to put a couple of these esp boards strategically around the house and no matter which board picks up the signal from the esp or from the thermometer it's going to send that proxy it through to home assistant so i can basically almost create what what i consider a little mesh network of receivers for bluetooth and have that get back into home assistant so i can action on those things and once you have that mesh network or that thing up and running it should start to auto discover those devices as soon as it sees a packet from one of your thermometers or any other bluetooth device and it may take some time it may not be instantaneous it really depends on how often those packets are sent out once it sees that it should start picking up those and home assistant if it knows about what that device is we'll start to be able to put those into auto discovery and you'll be able to work with those those thermometers that i'm talking about there's an integration now for xiaomi thermometers that allows it to detect those so as soon as those start sending packets it should show up as an item or an entity and home assistant now if for some reason it doesn't discover these things automatically you can try to force it so i'm going to go over here to my integrations again if you saw anything come up that would be just auto-discovered you'd see the notifications here but because i don't i'm going to do a little trick here and we'll see if we can get this to work we're going to go to integrations and i'm going to add an integration by clicking this button down here and i'm going to click on or search for xiaomi and it's the ble here and i'm going to choose a device to set up and i've got two showing up here so one is my well they're two different thermometers so i'm going to click one and i think this one is down in that room there and i'm going to add another one which is another xiaomi ble and it's the other sensor i'm going to click on that and i believe that one is uh let's just call that one studio possibly and now you have two devices uh here is a temperature and humidity of one of my xiaomi's and this is coming in via the ble this device right here which you can barely see it's coming in via um this ble sense or this proxy so this is plugged into the computer but it's all of its it's just for power everything else is going from ble bluetooth from those thermometers into uh the wi-fi my wi-fi and then into home assistant that way you can already see it's doing some more updates here i've got the battery voltage the temperature battery percentage and the humidity on this one and we can go back over here and look at this other one as well and this also has the humidity and temperature and when it updates the battery percentage and the battery voltage it'll show up here as well and again all of those are coming from just a single you probably didn't see any of that did you let me do this again okay so this one is my second one and it shows humidity 44.3 percent temperature 79.7 and again this is all coming in via this little um ble sensor right here and going into home assistant so as soon as you have your gateway set up all you have to do then is find any ble devices that you want to be able to integrate into home assistant if they have an integration a bluetooth integration and if they are even if they are not auto discovered you can go into integrations like i just showed you and you can set those up through this little integrations add integrations button so i don't know what other stuff is even out there there's just all kinds of different things that might be able to be added directly through the integration so what i did though is i did ask a few of you i said what do you think this is a really short time ago so not a lot of time to answer but i said what would you do with this ble uh what are the use cases for this ble proxy or bluetooth proxy and there is a serta motion signature bed that this person is talking about and then this one this person says um sprinkler controllers so if your home assistant's on the far side of where your sprinkler controllers are then you're going to have a likely have some issues with that now sprinkler controllers may need to be more active than passive but each device will depend on how you have that set up so that is a very very quick overview of bluetooth proxies it also shows you how simple it is to set it up the steps are simple get an esp board or one of those other things that i showed you and then flash it with esp configure the wi-fi on it and then put it somewhere where it can passively pick up the bluetooth signals and then from there you can start doing all kinds of stuff with it i hope that was helpful and shows you a little bit about that i'm sure there's going to be more to come on these especially when we start talking about active versus passive bluetooth and i'm curious what your use cases would be for this if you have a use case for these bluetooth proxies drop that down in the comments down below i like to read it like everyone else to read it because this is a new kind of fun technology bluetooth itself is not but extending bluetooth out to be able to do more things in a smart home makes it more useful as of right now you have to be very close to your bluetooth box or hub in order for it to really do any good and now you can really do all kinds of stuff with it so again let me know in the comments what you think you might want to do with this let me know if you have any questions i'm also on discord again if you want to support me join the channel and hit that subscribe button and we'll see on the next video [Music] you

Channel: mostlychris

Views: 63,851

Keywords: Smart Home, Home Assistant, bluetooth, bluetooth ble device finder, bluetooth ble range, bluetooth proxy home assistant, bluetooth proxy server, esp32 projects, esp32 tutorial, esphome home assistant, esphome projects, esphome esp32, xiaomi thermometer, xiaomi ble devices, xiaomi ble sensor, xiaomi ble temperature and humidity sensor, esphome bluetooth, bluetooth proxy, home assistant bluetooth

Id: CjpPdwK_ttg

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022