Why do we need a bluetooth proxy for Home Assistant? The answer is simple! Sometimes Bluetooth Low-Energy devices have craptastic range. Many of us have spend time, effort, and money to build out excellent Wi-Fi coverage in our homes and even backyards. So why not harness the power of this coverage and use it to communicate with Bluetooth devices. This is exactly what Bluetooth Proxies do! You can put some SwitchBot temperature sensors in the backyard or even a Bluetooth pool sensor in the pool and have all the data automatically brought into Home Assistant. Any many other Bluetooth HA compatible devices. While you can easily place a NodeMCU ESP32 board outdoors to accomplish this, it might not always be ideal for cosmetic reasons or even for water proofing reasons.
This is where the Wyze Outdoor Plug comes into play. It's IP64 dual relay plug with power monitoring, LUX sensor and since it has an onboard dual core ESP32 chip we can use it with ESPHome as a bluetooth proxy for Home Assistant. It also comes with a little better quality WiFi/Bluetooth antenna than your standard PCB antenans. And yes, we have a no soldering solution! Let's get started!
***UPDATED Guide to Load ESPHome all over the air on Tuya Beken SmartHome Devices
The entire process we covered 3 or 4 months ago just became 10 times easier thanks to efforts of the Libretiny and Tuya-CloudCutter developers!
Remember the days of Tuya-Convert where you could obtain a Tuya based Wi-Fi Smart device, run a quick exploit via a Raspberry-Pi and load your own copy of Tasmota or ESPHome firmware right on the device? Things were patched unfortunately and then later the chipsets were changed to a Beken based chipset that wouldn't run Tasmota at all. So we resorted to chip swapping with hot air guns, soldering, etc. to install our favorite local & open source firmware on the device. Things are now going full circle again where we can load firmware on the Beken chipsets with an over the air exploit called tuya-cloudcutter It is such an awesome process and down right addictive!. Then the bigger accomplishment is the LibreTiny project has it all working with ESPHome! No additional firmware to learn is awesome especially for the ESPHome veterans! Plus it all integrates with Home Assistant like any other ESPHome device does.
First a device that is Beken based and on the list of exploitable devices with tuya-cloudcutter (more are being added all the time!). In this example I'm using the Globe Motion NightLight Plug
Second a laptop, NUC, PC, etc or Raspberry-Pi to run the exploit and also load the ESPHome firmware.
The instructions below are based on using a Raspberry-Pi, if you are using a different computer you will need to adapt by using a different OS flavor but the concept is all the same. If you are more of a full-video type of person and want the complete walk through view the video below.
Home Assistant devs have released an official docker container to install the Matter Server necessary for the Matter integration in Home Assistant. No more building your own container since you don't use HAOS! The Python-Matter-Server repo is available on GitHub. This allows you to integrate the various available and upcoming Smart Home Matter devices with Home Assistant no matter what type installation method you use in your home.
After searching through many mmWave sensors, some bad, some great, some expensive, I've landed on the LD1125G. An inexpensive sensor and stupid quick! In the video below I cover the testing process, building and installing open source ESPHome software on the ESP32. No cloud, no additional apps, and 100% local.
The use of a PIR has plagued my bathrooms from time to time with lights going out too early based on various activities in the bathroom. One cheat I did was to use the humidity sensor that drives the fan to force the light to be on when the humidity is high. This has worked well for the most part but I've been looking to fix the pain point in the smart home world for quite some time. I've finally found a sensor that works quick, easy to install and use. This has unlocked various new automations for the bathroom such as; turn on the vent if someone is in the bathroom for more than a minute or two, turn off the light once the person leaves and still allow the vent to run to pull down the humidity. Fully automating the light and fan in the bathroom may sound silly to some individuals but it is the thing that makes the home a true Smart Home and not use a remote controlled one.
Thanks Caleb for the awesome diagram! For a power source, I'm currently using a 5VDC power supply in my attic that powers many ESP based projects around the house in the walls, ceiling, etc.
***UPDATE 05/28/2023 - LibreTuya renamed to LibreTiny
Remember the days of Tuya-Convert where you could obtain a Tuya based Wi-Fi Smart device, run a quick exploit via a Raspberry-Pi and load your own copy of Tasmota or ESPHome firmware right on the device? Things were patched unfortunately and then later the chipsets were changed to a Beken based chipset that wouldn't run Tasmota at all. So we resorted to chip swapping with hot air guns, soldering etc to get our favorite local non-cloud firmware on the device. Things are now going full circle again where we can load firmware on the Beken chipsets with an over the air exploit called tuya-cloudcutter It is such an awesome process and down right addictive!. Then the bigger accomplishment is the LibreTiny project has it all working with ESPHome! No additional firmware to learn especially for the ESPHome folks. It all integrates with Home Assistant like any other ESPHome device does.
First a device that is Beken based and on the list of exploitable devices with tuya-cloudcutter (more are being added all the time!). In this example I'm using the Globe Motion NightLight Plug
Second a laptop, NUC, PC, etc or Raspberry-Pi to run the exploit and also load the ESPHome firmware.
The instructions below are based on using a Raspberry-Pi, if you are using a different computer you will need to adapt by using a different OS flavor but the concept is all the same. If you are more of a full-video type of person and want the complete walk through view the video below.
Testing 24 different sensors with temperature and humidity in various environments from the refrigerator, freezer, room temperature, outside, and even the shower for the ultimate humidity test. I've included several Grafana graphs to help determine your BEST sensor for the environment and use case you have.
Koenkk, the great mastermind behind Zigbee2MQTT and the Z-Stack firmware that runs on the various Zigbee Coordinators, has released a new updated firmware for the CC2652/CC1352 series chipsets. This firmware is for both Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant ZHA users. The changelog is as follows:
Improve performance/reliability for larger network (100+ devices)
The old saying of if isn't broke then don't fix it definitely applies here for the average Zigbee network sizes. I have a mixture of various Zigbee devices of around 50 devices and I've been running this firmware in beta for a few weeks without any issues. I'm using a CC2652P2 based Sonoff Dongle-P USB coordinator with Zigbee2MQTT. Several Home Assistant ZHA users on the Github testing thread have also reported no issues during the beta period. Give it a whirl if you want to, you can always downgrade if you think it is causing issues.
