Bluetooth Proxy

 I have a number of these,

https://buythermopro.com/product/tp357/?srsltid=AfmBOopPAqMD8LevxJewN2nf1H35xTTa1SQUm3UZew3Ek0fzLAU5LL80

Available from Amazon.

They are cheap, reasonably accurate, BLE thermometers & humidity sensors.

They are hooked up to Home Assistant via a Thermopro integration & work well, but the odd one is right on the edge of range from the RPI4 running HA.

So, never played with ESPHome before, it integrates into Home Assistant  & offers an easy way to compile & run on an ESP32.

I had a few spare ESP32C3 boards, so decided to give it a go.

Installed the ESPHome addon into HA, plugged the C3 board into my laptop, added a Bluetooth proxy & compiled it, it compiles on the RPI4 & makes it stagger a bit, despite having several  goes at installing it, it baulks at the installation.

I used a downloaded ESP installer which works, after that all updates are done over wifi.

Sat & watched it, no devices showing in the log, tweaked to log to verbose, still nothing.

Edited the YAML to try various things, nothing.

Eventually, this works,

esphome:

  name: bluetooth-proxy

  friendly_name: Bluetooth Proxy

esp32:

  board: esp32-c3-devkitm-1

  framework:

    type: esp-idf

    sdkconfig_options:

      CONFIG_BT_BLE_50_FEATURES_SUPPORTED: y

      CONFIG_BT_BLE_42_FEATURES_SUPPORTED: y

      CONFIG_ESP_TASK_WDT_TIMEOUT_S: "10"

esp32_ble_tracker:

  scan_parameters:

# Adjust timing if the defaults do not work in your environment

#    interval: 1100ms

#    window: 1100ms

    active: true

bluetooth_proxy:

  active: true

 

# Enable logging

logger:

  level: DEBUG

# Enable Home Assistant API

api:

  encryption:

    key: "xxxxxxxxxx"

ota:

  - platform: esphome

    password: "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

wifi:

  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid

  password: !secret wifi_password

  # Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails

  ap:

    ssid: "Bluetooth-Proxy Fallback Hotspot"

    password: "xxxxxxxxxxxxx"

captive_portal:

   

It proxies the Bluetooth packets over wifi to whatever integration requires it (in my case Thermopro)

It runs seamlessly with the normal Bluetooth on the RPI4.

Result!