How To Make a Home Assistant Bluetooth Proxy | EASY NO Soldering

so you may have missed that live stream where paul has popped on we talked about the whole cool upcoming bluetooth proxy thing and yeah live streams kind of suck we're trying to get data or how to's or whatever it may be so this is where we're at in this little how-to video now this is going to be loading some software it's really simple to put on this little esp chip that is going to act as the bluetooth receiver and well what it why why do i need a bluetooth receiver well that's to power and listen to all the cool little displays you have around the house for temperature humidity and switchbot stuff the whole nine yards and i'm sure there's going to be a ton of new sensors coming out in the future and well i had a lot of issues with trying to do the little usb dongle because i just run the home assistant core containers i know several others have different other setups and yeah i heard it from trying to you know put that little usb driver and everything well this is the answer i can tell you it is stupid simple to put this on and you just bring it into home assistant and it's that simple no matter what kind of install you have so let's get to it so what esp32 well there's tons of different flavors and they're pretty much gonna do all the same as just how you connect to them now these two are going to be your ethernet style so we'll kind of get to those later these are all going to be wi-fi connected to your network yeah that is dual roll given that the chip is doing bluetooth and it's doing the wi-fi on the same chip so yeah it does have to switch back and forth but if you don't have a whole lot of sensors you can just put these around the house you can find a case on say thingiverse if you have a 3d printer you can print them out don't have a case you can go to get like something look around the dollar stores you can put it in there that way you're not short near the pins out now they also have some other ones that m5 stack makes that come in these little cool little cases you could use those as well this just happens to be one that has a gps module with it you don't have to get that one of course and tons of different flavors just make sure currently as of right now the regular dual core esp32 is kind of the way to go there's probably going to be more support for other variants later but i would stick with kind of the tried and true right now and don't forget there are some products that have esp32 in them as well such as the shelley one plus there's the wise outdoor plug etc but for the most part if you just get you a dev board and you haven't messed with them before there's no having to hook up any wires or anything is just plug into the usb port this one's micro usb i believe this one's usbc and connect them up and that's going to be for your initial flash which we'll get to right after this segment and now there are some other ones that i would say probably the reliability is going to be a little bit better this one's going to be your easiest to use i would say because it has the usb port on the side and it uses power over ethernet how cool is that you just plug it up plug it to your network if you're doing like say security cameras or whatnot it gets the power from there they do have some cases on thingiverse i printed out a couple of them this is the one that the esp home people linked but i did find it was kind of brittle and this one's a little thicker but they do work well for doing the cases for this little guy or you can figure out something else the reason why this is the reliability i think is a little bit better is because the data is going to flow out the ethernet and then that leaves the chip free to just do bluetooth only kind of focus on that single job so now this one is the wireless tag it does have ethernet but it's not power over ethernet so you still need to power using the pins the initial programming you have to use the little pins on the side but after that you can just do the wireless upgrades which just goes to pretty much any of these so let's get these connected and we'll get one and we'll plug it in and we'll show you how easy it is to throw that proxy into home assistant so there are a couple ways to do this and by far the easiest is just going to go to the esp home bluetooth proxies page and yup you know i'll leave that link down below while you're there go ahead and smash the like whatever it may be and hey you should probably subscribe anyway if you haven't already and now you just need to pick the device that you have i'm just going to be using a generic esp32 and we'll go ahead and hit connect and i wanted to show what happens if you don't have anything connected because it will show you for instance if you do have it plugged in and you don't have the drivers for your correct thing you can a lot of times just go into if you're on a windows box go look into windows update look under optional updates and a lot of times that driver will be there for you if it's not you can just follow some of these right here so plug in just using a little usb cable and i'll refresh the page to make sure hit connect and you should see this is using chrome you should see that you're gonna get your com port you can go ahead and pick it some of the devices you do need to hold down the boot button as you're applying power like as you're plugging in the cable but most of them you don't so just a lot of them just plug in and give it a shot we'll hit connect and you should get this device dashboard i am using a dark reader but the screen may look a little different if you do get like a manifest download error just try to refresh the page sometimes i've been able to click other devices and come back i'm not sure exactly what does that have seen on the tasmota side too so we'll hit esp32 generic it's going to warn you that you're going to erase your device yep i'm going to go ahead and erase it i don't have anything on it it install it's going to go through it's going to say erasing and it takes a couple minutes they'll tell you to leave the page up leave the page up so while it's installing the software if you get stuck and you get some error you can't get you can find the discord links down below and you can come ask some of the friendly users in there for some help so once it's complete it's going to scan your wi-fi how cool is that and you just simply hit the drop down and pick your network and put in the password that is for your wi-fi so hit connect it'll say trying to connect device connected to your network and you should just be able to even really just hit add to home assistant now one thing you do need to be which is a requirement is you need to be on 2022.9 or better that's going to support these bluetooth proxies so do make sure you upgrade your home assistant if you don't as well as is a good idea to update esp home if you're using that add-on or container what not as well now for you seasoned esp home users and you want to do your own little sketch yaml file or whatever and i will put this down in the description so you can just copy and paste is you do need to upgrade to the latest version of esp home i think it's 22.8.3 if i believe has this support and simply you do need to add this section here and it will become a bluetooth proxy so you can already see the power you could add this to some other existing esp32 you may already have an esp home there's a cool thing called discovery that's going to probably even pull it in just pull up notifications on mine and it bet you it will have that bluetooth proxy yep there it is and you'll see it automatically just hit configure now if you don't get the discovery automatically you can just hit add integration and hit esp home and put in the address for your particular node hit submit we'll hit finish and you should see shortly that it will start to pick up some of the bluetooth sensors in your home as you can see here they're popping in it's this simple we didn't have to do any code or anything open any files really or whatnot we just went to that page installed that software on our esp chip and there it is and you can see it's picking up this is the i can notice that ink bird one in my freezer we'll just hit configure hit submit yep it's that goofy that i have on the desk over here hit submit yep this is the little xiaomi one now there is some firmware that you do need to upgrade on here and i don't get it's not really anything crazy you really just need to connect to it with a bluetooth capable phone or computer and go to a website and you click connect on this guy and you push over the information you will need to get this set for bt home i believe is the name now some of the other versions had h-a-b-l-e and then it will get picked up into home assistant automatically so that's pretty much it if you have any other ones i'm sure it's going to change over time on what sensors they do support but you can already see the power behind it is it's pulling up and showing they have got humidity and temperature and there's the battery the ink bird has battery i have some rechargeables in there and showing that it is .63 degrees 0.63 fahrenheit which is because that's in my freezer so pretty cool stuff and it's pretty auto magic stuff just pops in it's pretty awesome stuff so that'll wrap it up for this one it's pretty awesome how stupid simple they've made this for us to add all these bluetooth gateways or ears around the house to pick up all your cool bluetooth sensors so shoot us a comment down below i'd love to see what y'all are doing out there with all your different bluetooth sensors around the house i love to hear about the different little weird ideas that people have so i appreciate all the patreon subscribers youtube members who definitely couldn't do it without you and yep y'all know the drill smash all the buttons down there and y'all take care

Channel: digiblur DIY

Views: 51,958

Keywords: digiblur, digiblurDIY, home automation, hass.io, hassos, tasmota, esp32, esp8266, arduino, esphome, diy, smart home, electronics, cameras, zigbee, wifi, bluetooth proxy, esphome ble, home assistant bluetoth, bluetoth, how to esphome bluetooth

Id: 1VXktM03pVs

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2022