Finally! A vid on how to set up an use Bermuda properly! You are the first to do it well mate. Thanks! Bermuda is awesome! We all wait in hope for proper trilateration and ability to use on 2 different floor levels...
Also a thank you for suggesting Bermuda. It might have been hard to find a replacement that good without the suggestion. I love the play on it - Bermuda triangle... Little things like that impress me lol
@@EsotericArctos yeah, I use it myself now. It's always better to have something, well-supported by community. I'm into voice all hands now, so don't have time or wish to compete with that great product. ;)
@@formatBCE I really appreciate that you directed folks over to Bermuda - it was only after I watched one of Alan's vids that I discovered yours, it can be tough discovering what's out there. If you ever feel like chipping in with Bermuda I'd welcome your experience - but I'm also very glad to see more skilled hands diving into voice stuff!
Crazy, I saw your last video and it had been living rent-free at the top of my to-do list. I was just not set up for having more than my ESPHome devices, so yesterday when I had 2 hours of free time, I found Bermuda and set it up. Nice coincidence!! Cheers
@@HomeAutomationGuy Gennerally really good, i think i need to work a little bit on my placement and disable the ble in my intel nuc so i have the sameboard and purely esphome, and with the per device adjustment coming in v0.6.9 it should also be able to calibrate, since i'm jumping a bit around current and nearby rooms currently :)
Just started implementing ESPresense, but this is actually so much better for my setup. I have at least one Shelly/ESP32 in each room - thanks for your video! ❤
This is exactly something I imagined having 20 years ago but never came around of actually doing! It's always great to see what other HA users have come up with to automate their homes further. Recently I bought a few Tråfri light bulbs from Ikea to replace Tuya bulbs (which I absolutely hate because of their natural behaviour of losing the connection every once in a while) and I have the one in the living room hooked up to an automation where I can dim the light whenever Disney+ starts playing and restore full brightness when it's paused and/or stopped. Another automation I have is with a Ring doorbell and a smart shelly-like 1-gang switch that turns on the light in the hallway when somebody rings the doorbell, and one of us is home, and it's between sunset and sunrise. After 5 minutes the light is turned off again. Same thing for when we get back home and it's dark outside, the light in the hallway is turned on for 5 minutes just to make coming home a bit more convenient. I will look into the kinds of things I can do in my home with ESP devices and location tracking. Keep those ideas coming! :)
I use mine mainly for power saving for the TV and lights. If we move away from the TV room for more than 5 minutes, it checks to see if anyone else is still in the room, waits a few more minutes and if no one returns, it will pause the Apple TV, turns the TV off and all the lights in the room. For the Bedroom, if one of us goes to bed early it will prevent the bedroom light coming on when the other person enters the room, it will only light the underbed strip light so they don't trip over anything.
Thanks a lot for this Alan! I have been using ESPresence for a while now and was having issues with some iBeacons but this is working perfectly and much easier to set up and configure. I am mainly using it to track my bins so I know when I forget to put them out. The idea of location based changes to the UI is an awesome idea as well though. Time to start throwing some more ESP32's around the house I think...
Thanks for the video! Gave me the little push I needed to redo my room-based-presense-dynamic-dashboard doodad that I left on the back-burner for a bit. Been using Bermuda for a while and while it's not perfect, I love that I can use it through ESPHome rather than having dedicated nodes like with ESPresense. Enjoy the videos you make and always lok forward to the next one!
I use espresense to do this, but I also have it attached to my robot vaccume. When it goes into a room, HA records the current state of the lights, turns them on if it needs to and when the robot leaves the room, it turns the lights back to their previous state. I'll probably change it to also record if there was soneone in the room when the robot came in and if they left when the robot came in, I'll turn the lights off when the robot leaves.
Thx a lot! You promised, and you did! Super ! This with your other dashboard vidoe rocks! Would make complete with some automation ideas combined with this room tracking....
I had planned to set up room presence for my flatmate and me, so that we would know who had started the washing machine. So that it would only notify the correct person when it was finished, instead of notifying everyone. At the moment it only check who is home at the moment.
That's a cool idea! You could also use NFC stickers on the washing machine - one for each flatmate, then you scan yours when you put your load of washing in.
Both of these ideas would need a failsafe. For example, if you track who is in the laundry room when the laundry starts, what happenes if both flatmates are there? What happenes if no device is detected when the laundry starts? For Alan's suggestion, its a bit less straight forward. What happens if no one scans their tag during a load? What if one flatmate scans the other's tag? What if both tags are scanned for the same load? This is not me saying the ideas are bad, far from it. Its just that there is more to consider for possible, if infrequent, situations, and i feel there should be a plan in place for HA to detect it, and respond accordingly. Full disclosure, im literally in the middle of implimenting this exact idea for my household and have been thinking about it a lot lately.
Loved the jokes and your dog 😂 I've been tuning my Bermuda settings recently with the beta version which is awesome. I love having a dynamic dashboard for the room I'm in so I can adjust things quickly if needed.
My primary issue with Bermuda right now is the lack of individual tracking node settings, especially stuff like signal strength sensitivity adjustments. I got a bunch of super cheap ESP32-C3 boards a while back (probably not recommended due to them being single core), and I was having issues with finding good spots for everything such that they'd only pick me up in one room and not another adjacent room. Being able to adjust sensitivity would really help in that regard, I feel. Still, it's incredibly exciting, and on a user side probably the best implementation of BLE tracking thus far. Really can't wait to see it develop further. EDIT: I seem to be unable to leave comments in my own thread? Weird; I blame UA-cam. Either way, v0.6.9rc2 adds that feature in and with my preliminary testing it's exactly what I've been looking for!
I have been lucky enough that it's not been an issue for me. I was able to move some of my trackers around to prevent that issue, but I can see value in individual settings. Maybe the open source community will figure out a good way to implement it!
i think v0.6.9rc2 is what you are looking for if i'm correctly understanding your current issue :) still in beta though but should be able to solve it for you? :)
Please do a video on music. Including wiring up the speakers and connecting with a device. I want to play music from my phone on ceiling mounted speakers and have music follow along based on which room I'm in. Can't find any guide.
I show notifications from HA on my WebOS TV, but only if I'm the only one in the living room - no need if someone else is watching the TV. I nad to install two 'm5stack atom lite's in opposing corners for this to work reliably. One of those is also driving a radar (ld2420).
@@HomeAutomationGuy Actually, after watching this video I came up with another idea - since some of my family members have two trackable items - a health tracker and a phone, and since the watch is only visible via BLE when it's not connected to a phone (which probably means the phone's battery is dead), I made a helper-template, with some help from Claude-sonnet :) template: - sensor: name: "Chuck Location Area" state: > {% if states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_watch_area') not in ['unavailable', 'unknown'] %} {{ states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_watch_area') }} {% elif states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_flip_area') not in ['unavailable', 'unknown'] %} {{ states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_flip_area') }} {% else %} unknown {% endif %}
You are the man! Thank you for all your content I have learn a lot. Is there a video that shows how to access HA remotely safely and secure on docker. I now use Zerotier using the add-ons on HA OS but I don't know how to do it using docker may be you can show us how to do it. Thank you once again. I look in your channel but I didn't find anything.
I found this video super useful. Thank you for the detailed explanation of the setup. I have one question. I’m using Shelly Plus relays and all is working great however I often get some false ‘bounces’ between rooms. I am using an Apple Watch and a Tile device to cover mine and my wife’s locations. Do you know which global setting I need to adjust to make it less susceptible to this bounce effect? Keep up the great work.
I think even though Format is archived, it will still work for a while. Archive just means no further updates usually. Bermuda is pretty good though. Bermuda seems to have a good level of accuracy. It doesn't use triangulation as such, but trilateration Trilateration measures distances from particular base stations, using a minimum of 3 to work out the location. Triangulation is a little different, using measurements of angles to determine location instead of distances. I love the M5 stack options, but I have enough BLE proxies and devices that are all over the house to just add code to them to make it work. Just annoying my FitBit watch doesn't send BLE beacons once it is paired to my phone. Annoying as I always have the watch on, where I don't always have my phone in my pocket at home
Haha yes - I agonised over the trilateration / triangulation thing for a while - ended up deciding to properly refer to it as trilateration and then mention triangulation in the readme a lot since that's the more commonly-googled term! 😅
Great video Alan. Can you please show in more detail how to setup the presence next to the users picture? I can only get the default person icon to show. 😅. Thx
I was just watching your previous video (Format BLE tracking, which I just found to be privated when I refreshed) and trying to set up Bermuda by combining that with some other videos. This helps a ton, great timing! And finally a good video on how to set up Bermuda. Only thing that I am missing is how to set this up for iOS devices.. the Github page doesn't specify this very well either.
Sorry - I took the Format-BLE video down when I uploaded this new one! I don't have any iDevices, so I don't actually know how to configure it for them.
Great videos as always, but I didnt fall for the pet tracking trick :D In one image it looks like like your dog is tracked by the pitpack tracker, however in the video you state you use a tile device. Perhaps a short video on your experience of these two devices? (Awesome dog btw)
Ha, yeah he has both trackers. The PitPat for GPS and the BLE for indoors. I'm trying to figure out how to get the PitPat to broadcast out the Bluetooth BLE packets, as it definitely has it built in
Only I found was that it doesn’t always place you in the correct room if you have multiple esp32 devices. With ESPresense it was possible to set a maximum distance on each device but can work out how to do this now
“In my case, I use Apple Watches to detect which room of the house I’m in, as it’s something you always wear. It’s even more effective than the phone since you only take it off when you put it to charge.”
I think it's in the settings for the companion app. Note that turning on the "only transmit when on the home network" will slow down detection of arriving home (if you use Bermuda's device_tracker for that).
Yes it uses quite a lot. The `web` component is one you can ditch to save a fair amount of memory, too. But yeah, if you're running voice stuff it might be too much. I know some folk have managed to fix bt proxy and voice on one device - are you using the esp-idf "platform" in esphome, or the default "ardiuino"? esp-idf works better and uses less memory, AFAIK. Thankfully esp32's in things like the D1mini32 only cost AU$6 or so from AliExpress, which makes it a little less painful if you have to double up on devices a bit.
Awesome video! After a whole bunch of troubleshooting I (mostly) got this to work, thanks so much! Does anyone know if it's possible to tweak the strength of an individual Proxy? Atm I have 3 ESP32 devices and one EverythingPresenceLite working as sensors for me. The problem I'm having is the EPL seems to be overpowering the other devices. Unless I'm RIGHT on top of one of the other devices, it reports as being next to the EPL, even though I'm in another room!
It's not so much the "strength", but the sensitivity level of the detector and I too notice that the EPLs are much more sensitive. Hopefully one day we can adjust the sensitivity of individual proxies!
Great video! I have an odd issue. When I turn on the HA Android BT "Transmit on home network SSID only" The transmitter stops. When I turn off the setting it starts to transmit. Yes the phone is connected to the same wireless is the ESP and the same network HA is on.
I had the same issue. I needed to set the SSID in the phone app (home assistant->settings->companion app->home (under Servers & Devices)->Home Network WiFi SSID (under Connection Information)
Amazing video. Thank you for sharing. I do have a question though: How do you create your person card that shows which room you, your partner, or your dog are in? I want to create something similar, but all my google-fu skills have come up with nothing. Are you able to share how you did it, or if it's embedded into another video you created, can you share which? Thanks Again!
This is great (if it works for me), I have been looking for something that can use my everything presence sensors. Next job kitchen lighting, any ideas? 😂 (joking, will be following your vids)
Can you write up how to enable tracking of an iphone? I read the Bermuda site but don't see the links too the apps that we'd use instead of the HA Companion App.
Hey Alan, Thanks for the informative video! i saw you have some Atom Stack M5 Echos. Did you get them running with Bluetooth proxy? I have some troubles enabling it (Next to the Voice assistant) because the Application size gets to big when trying to flash the new configuration. Did you have similar issues?
I did. I no longer use them for HA Voice as I found the hardware to do a pretty bad job of detecting my speech, so I repurposed them to be Bluetooth proxies only.
This looks great, I have just installed Shelly's behind every switch in my house so I just have to tell it what to track. this looks really cool. As for the tag for your dog, I can't find them outside the UK shop and it doesn't deliver down under. Do you have any other recommendations?
It sounds like you're using the wrong entity. Make sure you're using the Area entity and triggering it when the state changes to the text of the area you want
Incredibly helpful video thank you. I have this 95% executed, but the one issue I ran into was the tracking beacon for the dog. I purchased a virtually identigy Holy IOT tracker, but notice that it is frequently inaccurate compared to the iphone beacons connecting to the wrong room tracker. I'm hesitant to adjust the global options since our phones are so locked in. Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot?
I also found that the Holy IOT tracker seems to have a much stronger signal strength than my phone. I found it's mostly accurate though as the closest Bluetooth proxy still notices the stronger signal than the others. Maybe try upping the strength of the beacons on your phone a small amount and recalibrating?
@@HomeAutomationGuy Ah glad to hear you ran into a similar finding. That is a good idea about the strength of the beacons, I'm not sure if iPhones let you manipulate that attribute. I may need to try playing a bit further with the location of the beacons to help. Some of my rooms are smaller and with the added strength of that beacon may be the reason it is misjudging the room frequently. My next course might be to combine some of those smaller areas together as joint conditional cards and repurpose some of the beacons to make it more reliable.
In a flash of luck bermuda just pushed an update that allows you to calibrate individual devices with rssi offsets. Hopefully that should do the trick!
Anyway to help out for the template sensor? Does not seem to do much when i add it to my Config.yaml, I do not see the entities that should have been created. Thank you
It sure is a Stream Deck. There's a plugin for it that lets you call Home Assistant services and APIs from the stream deck. I use it to trigger scenes and control my blinds.
Thanks for the great video! I have this working with a beacon. However it doesn't work with my generic smart watch. I have the correct Mac address. Any ideas? Also, I have a question. You only added the bluetooth_proxy to the Esp32. You don't have to add the esp32_ble_tracker component, do you?
@@HomeAutomationGuy That's was my fear. Also, I have a question. You only added the bluetooth_proxy component to the Esp32. You don't have to add the esp32_ble_tracker component, do you?
My esp device just stays offline. What am I missing here to ensure it is online once it’s been adopted in home assistant? I have set a static ip. Is there something I need to do in the yaml of the device within esphome in HA?
Hi there. I am following your well written guide to try and set this up myself. However, I keep running into the same issue. I am able to successfully install ESPHome on my ESP32 device (just a generic once). After I adopt my ESP32 device in Home Assistant, I then try to install the new code with "bluetooth_proxy:" added to the configuration and I get this same error every single time: MissingPackageManifestError: Could not find one of 'package.json' manifest files in the package. I have even gone so far as to reinitialize and reinstall my ESP32 device from scratch. Any idea what is happening here?
Joking aside, how does Bermuda deal with the tracked Bluetooth device not being detected by any of the configured proxies? Does it have a configurable timeout?
Did you have any issues with the distance being WILDLY wrong on your sensors? Using a Samsung S20 phone and a generic esp32 it reports me as being 52 feet away from the ESP when I'm about 6' away. I had this same issue with other presence sensors and am wondering if there are some esp boards with bad BT antennas or bad circuit design or something that's causing this kind of weird error
This is quite normal. There are a lot of things that affect how strong a signal is received, some a device-specific and some are environmental, and some are just random. Typically the distances are OK in a "relative" sense, but if you have different receiver device types this will be a bigger problem. In Bermuda there is a "Reference power" setting. You can adjust this so that your phone reads correctly at about 3ft, then you set the "attenuation" so that it reads correctly at a bigger distance (say, 20ft). The next release (and the current beta, v0.6.9rc2) has/will have per-proxy calibration as well, which is helpful if you have different types of proxies working together.
Wow, 2 videos in two days! More tomorrow? I presume you could use a smart watch instead of the phones for tracking? I dont carry my phone with me all the time, and my wife definitely does not. We do have smart watches. Don't forget to put the seat back down!
Some smart watches apparently work, and my Fitbit has a Tile built into it somehow which works too. Two videos because I really had to get this Bluetooth one out. I didn't like that there was an old video of mine out there recommending something that no longer worked.
It comes as standard out of the box. You won’t see it in the config unless you follow the url in the ESPhome settings for it. There is a BT proxy and a non BT proxy url on the code owners site. My EPL kept going offline so I changed the settings url to pick the non BT proxy version and it’s been stable since (1 month or so)
I have a question... Let's say I want my ac to be at 24° when I am in my room... But now I changed it to 26° for my convenience... Will the automation will again change it to 24° after sometime as I am still in the room ? Or will not change it as I have entered the values manually ??
@@HomeAutomationGuy But isn't that a continuous loop to check if I'm in the room ? And when it detects that I'm still in the room and the temperature is at 26... It won't change it ? As the conditions would be if I'm in the room set the temperature to 24 and it will after some internals checks if I'm in the room or not ? If not close the AC ? If I'm ? Change it to 24 ??
This works great on my samsung s24 but on my girlfriends iphone 11 pro not. Any advice to get this working better? When the screen is off for a while the ble stops transmitting.
Have you got the "Private BLE Device" integration set up? It's by far the most reliable way to have iOS tracking (and it's great for Android) because iPhones do weird things when they sleep. Private BLE is likely to still detect the phone when it's asleep, since it will pick up *any* broadcasts it sends, not just the HA app's iBeacon packets. If you have a macbook the process is reasonably easy, if you don't then the Bermuda wiki has some pointers on ways to get the IRK (a key) that you need to get Private BLE Device working. Bermuda integrates automagically with Private BLE Device.
Great video! I installed all the software, but I can’t seem to locate my iPhone or Apple Watch. Those devices show what their Bluetooth IDs are, but those IDs not show up in the list of 47 devices that my Bluetooth proxy found. lightBlue shows my Apple Watch UU ID, but that doesn’t show up in the list of 47 devices either. Anyone have an idea what I’m missing?
If you're sending iBeacon UUIDs, then they should be in the top of the drop-down list in Bermuda. You can type part of a mac address or uuid into the box to shorten the list, sometimes it's hard to spot. If they're not there at all, you could try installing the v0.6.9rc2 version just to be sure you're on the latest, and send me the result of a "download diagnostics" as well as perhaps screenshots from lightBlue so I can see the current MAC and UUID for the device - you can upload that to the issues in Bermuda and I'll take a look to see what's going on.
Do you use ha cloud? If not how do you expose your ha to the internet. I personally use wireguard vpn to my local network. I'm hesitant to expose my instance to the internet. I don't trust ha that much to keep my network safe
Too bad this doesn't also work with mmWave sensors. I plan on using BLE for devices to use with smart dashboards, but we don't usually move with our phones so I need mmWave to automatically turn off lights & air conditioning in empty rooms. Does anyone else have family members who are allergic to off switches?
How do you make the automation that triggers on what area you're in? For me it only shows me the ability to put above or below distances, but you had your's set to just trigger based on whatever room your device says it's in. How did you do that?
I agree with that. But it's the best I can do with the technology I have. I don't want to install cameras inside my house to do facial recognition and implanting a BLE device under my skin is a bit Black Mirror.
@@HomeAutomationGuy Yes, I understand that, but I have children, for example, and no dog, and I don't want to tag them like that. My wife wants every smart device to work without a smartphone (I think that's smart too). It's not important to me where my children are, but that they have enough light and that there isn't a light on somewhere where no one is. I once heard that presence can also be measured using WiFi/Bluetooth waves, which I think is almost smarter.
Ohhh that's something totally different then. I use mmWave and Infrared sensors to detect presence and then the lights on for people in each room. The only difference is that it doesn't know WHO is in that room. Check out my motion sensor videos on my channel, it covers it in a lot more detail
My girlfriend would quickly disagree with you. Like Alan's, if she cant see her, shes probably doing something she shouldnt be. Having HA be able to keep an eye on wherever the 1.5yo puppy is, is a godsend
Finally! A vid on how to set up an use Bermuda properly! You are the first to do it well mate. Thanks! Bermuda is awesome! We all wait in hope for proper trilateration and ability to use on 2 different floor levels...
I'm glad it was helpful! I'm sure the software will keep getting better too
Sorry Alan for making you to shoot another video on this topic! Happy to find that it turned to be great for you! :)
No problem at all! Thanks again for the original solution that got me here 💙
Also a thank you for suggesting Bermuda. It might have been hard to find a replacement that good without the suggestion.
I love the play on it - Bermuda triangle... Little things like that impress me lol
@@EsotericArctos yeah, I use it myself now. It's always better to have something, well-supported by community.
I'm into voice all hands now, so don't have time or wish to compete with that great product. ;)
@@EsotericArctos haha you're the first to explicitly mention getting it (but I'm sure many have just groaned silently!), thanks! :D
@@formatBCE I really appreciate that you directed folks over to Bermuda - it was only after I watched one of Alan's vids that I discovered yours, it can be tough discovering what's out there. If you ever feel like chipping in with Bermuda I'd welcome your experience - but I'm also very glad to see more skilled hands diving into voice stuff!
Crazy, I saw your last video and it had been living rent-free at the top of my to-do list. I was just not set up for having more than my ESPHome devices, so yesterday when I had 2 hours of free time, I found Bermuda and set it up. Nice coincidence!! Cheers
That's great! How has it been behaving?
@@HomeAutomationGuy Gennerally really good, i think i need to work a little bit on my placement and disable the ble in my intel nuc so i have the sameboard and purely esphome, and with the per device adjustment coming in v0.6.9 it should also be able to calibrate, since i'm jumping a bit around current and nearby rooms currently :)
Respect to you for updating your video so promptly 🎉
Just started implementing ESPresense, but this is actually so much better for my setup. I have at least one Shelly/ESP32 in each room - thanks for your video! ❤
Glad it was helpful!
The thing that helped me the most in this video was the instructions for the settings in the HA Companion app.
Glad it was helpful!
This is exactly something I imagined having 20 years ago but never came around of actually doing! It's always great to see what other HA users have come up with to automate their homes further. Recently I bought a few Tråfri light bulbs from Ikea to replace Tuya bulbs (which I absolutely hate because of their natural behaviour of losing the connection every once in a while) and I have the one in the living room hooked up to an automation where I can dim the light whenever Disney+ starts playing and restore full brightness when it's paused and/or stopped. Another automation I have is with a Ring doorbell and a smart shelly-like 1-gang switch that turns on the light in the hallway when somebody rings the doorbell, and one of us is home, and it's between sunset and sunrise. After 5 minutes the light is turned off again. Same thing for when we get back home and it's dark outside, the light in the hallway is turned on for 5 minutes just to make coming home a bit more convenient.
I will look into the kinds of things I can do in my home with ESP devices and location tracking. Keep those ideas coming! :)
Great description of how to set this up using Bermuda. Thank you it will be very useful when I come to add this to my home assistant.
Glad it was helpful!
I use mine mainly for power saving for the TV and lights. If we move away from the TV room for more than 5 minutes, it checks to see if anyone else is still in the room, waits a few more minutes and if no one returns, it will pause the Apple TV, turns the TV off and all the lights in the room.
For the Bedroom, if one of us goes to bed early it will prevent the bedroom light coming on when the other person enters the room, it will only light the underbed strip light so they don't trip over anything.
Very nice! I use my bed sensor for a similar bedroom light automation.
Thanks a lot for this Alan! I have been using ESPresence for a while now and was having issues with some iBeacons but this is working perfectly and much easier to set up and configure. I am mainly using it to track my bins so I know when I forget to put them out. The idea of location based changes to the UI is an awesome idea as well though. Time to start throwing some more ESP32's around the house I think...
Glad it was helpful!
Great video. I had a vizsla for 15 years, wonderful dogs
Thanks!
Followed this guide and it seems to be working perfectly, thanks for taking the time to reshoot the video and inspiring me to give it a go 👍
You are most welcome!
Thanks for the video! Gave me the little push I needed to redo my room-based-presense-dynamic-dashboard doodad that I left on the back-burner for a bit. Been using Bermuda for a while and while it's not perfect, I love that I can use it through ESPHome rather than having dedicated nodes like with ESPresense. Enjoy the videos you make and always lok forward to the next one!
Bluetooth sniffing is always going to be a bit hit and miss, but Bermuda has been working well for me so far! Thanks for the kind words!
Thanks!
Thank you so much for your support 🙏 I really appreciate it
I use espresense to do this, but I also have it attached to my robot vaccume. When it goes into a room, HA records the current state of the lights, turns them on if it needs to and when the robot leaves the room, it turns the lights back to their previous state. I'll probably change it to also record if there was soneone in the room when the robot came in and if they left when the robot came in, I'll turn the lights off when the robot leaves.
That is really clever!! What a great idea
Thx a lot! You promised, and you did! Super ! This with your other dashboard vidoe rocks! Would make complete with some automation ideas combined with this room tracking....
Glad it was helpful for you ❤️
I had planned to set up room presence for my flatmate and me, so that we would know who had started the washing machine. So that it would only notify the correct person when it was finished, instead of notifying everyone. At the moment it only check who is home at the moment.
That's a cool idea! You could also use NFC stickers on the washing machine - one for each flatmate, then you scan yours when you put your load of washing in.
Both of these ideas would need a failsafe. For example, if you track who is in the laundry room when the laundry starts, what happenes if both flatmates are there? What happenes if no device is detected when the laundry starts?
For Alan's suggestion, its a bit less straight forward. What happens if no one scans their tag during a load? What if one flatmate scans the other's tag? What if both tags are scanned for the same load?
This is not me saying the ideas are bad, far from it. Its just that there is more to consider for possible, if infrequent, situations, and i feel there should be a plan in place for HA to detect it, and respond accordingly.
Full disclosure, im literally in the middle of implimenting this exact idea for my household and have been thinking about it a lot lately.
Loved the jokes and your dog 😂
I've been tuning my Bermuda settings recently with the beta version which is awesome. I love having a dynamic dashboard for the room I'm in so I can adjust things quickly if needed.
Thanks for the comment! I'm looking forward to playing with the Bermuda tuning settings
My primary issue with Bermuda right now is the lack of individual tracking node settings, especially stuff like signal strength sensitivity adjustments. I got a bunch of super cheap ESP32-C3 boards a while back (probably not recommended due to them being single core), and I was having issues with finding good spots for everything such that they'd only pick me up in one room and not another adjacent room. Being able to adjust sensitivity would really help in that regard, I feel.
Still, it's incredibly exciting, and on a user side probably the best implementation of BLE tracking thus far. Really can't wait to see it develop further.
EDIT: I seem to be unable to leave comments in my own thread? Weird; I blame UA-cam. Either way, v0.6.9rc2 adds that feature in and with my preliminary testing it's exactly what I've been looking for!
I have been lucky enough that it's not been an issue for me. I was able to move some of my trackers around to prevent that issue, but I can see value in individual settings.
Maybe the open source community will figure out a good way to implement it!
i think v0.6.9rc2 is what you are looking for if i'm correctly understanding your current issue :) still in beta though but should be able to solve it for you? :)
💯
@@bach000999 v0.6.9? Nice.
In all seriousness, I'm taking a look at it now! Curious to see how this will work vs v0.6.8.
As mentioned, the beta version has proxy specific calibration settings
Please do a video on music. Including wiring up the speakers and connecting with a device. I want to play music from my phone on ceiling mounted speakers and have music follow along based on which room I'm in. Can't find any guide.
It's hard to do but possible with snapcast + music assistant
Omg the underside of your bed looks EXACTLY like mine! 😂
I show notifications from HA on my WebOS TV, but only if I'm the only one in the living room - no need if someone else is watching the TV. I nad to install two 'm5stack atom lite's in opposing corners for this to work reliably. One of those is also driving a radar (ld2420).
That's cool! I've had to put more than one proxy into some of my bigger rooms too
@@HomeAutomationGuy Actually, after watching this video I came up with another idea - since some of my family members have two trackable items - a health tracker and a phone, and since the watch is only visible via BLE when it's not connected to a phone (which probably means the phone's battery is dead), I made a helper-template, with some help from Claude-sonnet :)
template:
- sensor:
name: "Chuck Location Area"
state: >
{% if states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_watch_area') not in ['unavailable', 'unknown'] %}
{{ states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_watch_area') }}
{% elif states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_flip_area') not in ['unavailable', 'unknown'] %}
{{ states('sensor.bermuda_chuck_flip_area') }}
{% else %}
unknown
{% endif %}
You are the man! Thank you for all your content I have learn a lot. Is there a video that shows how to access HA remotely safely and secure on docker. I now use Zerotier using the add-ons on HA OS but I don't know how to do it using docker may be you can show us how to do it. Thank you once again. I look in your channel but I didn't find anything.
Use Home Assistant Cloud from Nabu Casa! ❤️
I found this video super useful. Thank you for the detailed explanation of the setup. I have one question. I’m using Shelly Plus relays and all is working great however I often get some false ‘bounces’ between rooms. I am using an Apple Watch and a Tile device to cover mine and my wife’s locations. Do you know which global setting I need to adjust to make it less susceptible to this bounce effect? Keep up the great work.
There are now quite a few configuration options you can change such as the reference power and attentuation. I'm not an expert on how they work though
I think even though Format is archived, it will still work for a while. Archive just means no further updates usually. Bermuda is pretty good though. Bermuda seems to have a good level of accuracy. It doesn't use triangulation as such, but trilateration Trilateration measures distances from particular base stations, using a minimum of 3 to work out the location. Triangulation is a little different, using measurements of angles to determine location instead of distances.
I love the M5 stack options, but I have enough BLE proxies and devices that are all over the house to just add code to them to make it work. Just annoying my FitBit watch doesn't send BLE beacons once it is paired to my phone. Annoying as I always have the watch on, where I don't always have my phone in my pocket at home
Haha yes - I agonised over the trilateration / triangulation thing for a while - ended up deciding to properly refer to it as trilateration and then mention triangulation in the readme a lot since that's the more commonly-googled term! 😅
Yeah, I said it wrong... Sorry about that!
Thanks for creating such an awesome integration!!
@@HomeAutomationGuy Cheers, I get a buzz out of how much people are finding interesting uses for it!
@@HomeAutomationGuy Just checking in to see how Bermuda is working for you after a bit of time with it.
Is the room presence view displayed at 12:41 a custom dashboard, or was there some config i missed to get something like that?
Great video Alan. Can you please show in more detail how to setup the presence next to the users picture? I can only get the default person icon to show. 😅. Thx
I was just watching your previous video (Format BLE tracking, which I just found to be privated when I refreshed) and trying to set up Bermuda by combining that with some other videos. This helps a ton, great timing! And finally a good video on how to set up Bermuda. Only thing that I am missing is how to set this up for iOS devices.. the Github page doesn't specify this very well either.
Sorry - I took the Format-BLE video down when I uploaded this new one! I don't have any iDevices, so I don't actually know how to configure it for them.
Great videos as always, but I didnt fall for the pet tracking trick :D In one image it looks like like your dog is tracked by the pitpack tracker, however in the video you state you use a tile device. Perhaps a short video on your experience of these two devices? (Awesome dog btw)
Ha, yeah he has both trackers. The PitPat for GPS and the BLE for indoors. I'm trying to figure out how to get the PitPat to broadcast out the Bluetooth BLE packets, as it definitely has it built in
Only I found was that it doesn’t always place you in the correct room if you have multiple esp32 devices. With ESPresense it was possible to set a maximum distance on each device but can work out how to do this now
“In my case, I use Apple Watches to detect which room of the house I’m in, as it’s something you always wear. It’s even more effective than the phone since you only take it off when you put it to charge.”
exactly what I do. My next wearable will be a smart ring.
was there a trick to get your Apple Watch to show up? I don’t see the Bluetooth ID in the bermuda list. Thanks.
Thank you for this video 🙂
Thank you for the comments! 🙏
Thank you very much! I only got one question - how does HA know which SSID is the Home Network SSID?
I think it's in the settings for the companion app. Note that turning on the "only transmit when on the home network" will slow down detection of arriving home (if you use Bermuda's device_tracker for that).
Nice dog Alan!
Thank you love your advice, only thing is every time I try to add blue tooth proxy to esphome it requires to much memory
Yeah, I've had that problem on the ESPHome Voice assistant devices. 😥
Yes it uses quite a lot. The `web` component is one you can ditch to save a fair amount of memory, too. But yeah, if you're running voice stuff it might be too much. I know some folk have managed to fix bt proxy and voice on one device - are you using the esp-idf "platform" in esphome, or the default "ardiuino"? esp-idf works better and uses less memory, AFAIK.
Thankfully esp32's in things like the D1mini32 only cost AU$6 or so from AliExpress, which makes it a little less painful if you have to double up on devices a bit.
Awesome video! After a whole bunch of troubleshooting I (mostly) got this to work, thanks so much! Does anyone know if it's possible to tweak the strength of an individual Proxy? Atm I have 3 ESP32 devices and one EverythingPresenceLite working as sensors for me. The problem I'm having is the EPL seems to be overpowering the other devices. Unless I'm RIGHT on top of one of the other devices, it reports as being next to the EPL, even though I'm in another room!
It's not so much the "strength", but the sensitivity level of the detector and I too notice that the EPLs are much more sensitive. Hopefully one day we can adjust the sensitivity of individual proxies!
Great video! I have an odd issue. When I turn on the HA Android BT "Transmit on home network SSID only" The transmitter stops. When I turn off the setting it starts to transmit. Yes the phone is connected to the same wireless is the ESP and the same network HA is on.
I had the same issue. I needed to set the SSID in the phone app (home assistant->settings->companion app->home (under Servers & Devices)->Home Network WiFi SSID (under Connection Information)
@@briandarroch Perfect thanks
I can feel your statement about Vizslas doing things they shouldn't ... :D
He's such a rowdy troublemaker!
@@HomeAutomationGuy I know, at the best of times, we had 3 of them at home.
@@Matthias_Wagner Oh wow - I struggle enough with 1 🫠🐕
This video is great thank you!
Awesome stuff!
Thank you!
Hello and thanks, from this toilet, to that toilet. 😆
Amazing video. Thank you for sharing. I do have a question though:
How do you create your person card that shows which room you, your partner, or your dog are in? I want to create something similar, but all my google-fu skills have come up with nothing. Are you able to share how you did it, or if it's embedded into another video you created, can you share which? Thanks Again!
I used the Mushroom Entity Card to show the value of the room sensor and the picture of the person. I hope that helps!
@HomeAutomationGuy so it's not pulling from a ble sensor but a room sensor? Sorry, I'm fairly new to HA and teaching myself how to build a dashboard.
@@robertmclay9912 Sorry, I mean the Bermuda sensor that tells you what room the device is in.
This is great (if it works for me), I have been looking for something that can use my everything presence sensors. Next job kitchen lighting, any ideas? 😂 (joking, will be following your vids)
NEEDS MOAR LIGHTS!
Can you write up how to enable tracking of an iphone? I read the Bermuda site but don't see the links too the apps that we'd use instead of the HA Companion App.
Unfortunately not. I don't have any iDevices
Awesome video. Thank you.
have i missed how you set up what i assume is a card for room presence, with the persons name next to the location they are in?
I use a Mushroom entity card for this
Great content! Question, which card did you use for the person's location?
Thank you! It's a standard HA Tile card with some of the options configured to show just the image and the state.
Hey Alan, Thanks for the informative video! i saw you have some Atom Stack M5 Echos. Did you get them running with Bluetooth proxy? I have some troubles enabling it (Next to the Voice assistant) because the Application size gets to big when trying to flash the new configuration. Did you have similar issues?
I did. I no longer use them for HA Voice as I found the hardware to do a pretty bad job of detecting my speech, so I repurposed them to be Bluetooth proxies only.
This looks great, I have just installed Shelly's behind every switch in my house so I just have to tell it what to track. this looks really cool.
As for the tag for your dog, I can't find them outside the UK shop and it doesn't deliver down under. Do you have any other recommendations?
Hmmh. Any battery powered BLE beacon should work. Does AliExpress have anything that ships to Aus?
It sounds like you're using the wrong entity. Make sure you're using the Area entity and triggering it when the state changes to the text of the area you want
Incredibly helpful video thank you. I have this 95% executed, but the one issue I ran into was the tracking beacon for the dog. I purchased a virtually identigy Holy IOT tracker, but notice that it is frequently inaccurate compared to the iphone beacons connecting to the wrong room tracker. I'm hesitant to adjust the global options since our phones are so locked in. Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot?
I also found that the Holy IOT tracker seems to have a much stronger signal strength than my phone. I found it's mostly accurate though as the closest Bluetooth proxy still notices the stronger signal than the others.
Maybe try upping the strength of the beacons on your phone a small amount and recalibrating?
@@HomeAutomationGuy Ah glad to hear you ran into a similar finding. That is a good idea about the strength of the beacons, I'm not sure if iPhones let you manipulate that attribute. I may need to try playing a bit further with the location of the beacons to help. Some of my rooms are smaller and with the added strength of that beacon may be the reason it is misjudging the room frequently. My next course might be to combine some of those smaller areas together as joint conditional cards and repurpose some of the beacons to make it more reliable.
In a flash of luck bermuda just pushed an update that allows you to calibrate individual devices with rssi offsets. Hopefully that should do the trick!
@@bradlylevitt2000 I'm looking forward to trying it!
Anyway to help out for the template sensor? Does not seem to do much when i add it to my Config.yaml, I do not see the entities that should have been created. Thank you
is there anyway with the system to have a sensor that only allows a specific tracker and ignores all the others?
Great video as usual! Any chance of an update to the code for your bed sensor which turns on Bluetooth tracker - cheers :-)
You just need to add the bluetooth_proxy: line to the end of the ESPHome code 😊
What would be the best smart ring wearable to use? Stable "always on BT". One uuid easy to find in the bermuda settings. Long battery life. Thanks
Most wearable devices unfortunately stop broadcasting BLE beacons when they're paired with a phone
Did I spot A stream deck in this video? How did you get that to work with home assistant?
It sure is a Stream Deck. There's a plugin for it that lets you call Home Assistant services and APIs from the stream deck. I use it to trigger scenes and control my blinds.
@@HomeAutomationGuy a plugin? for home assistant? if that plugin runs on windoze or macos, it's no good for me because i use linux.
@@mrxmry3264 A plug in for the stream deck app.
Thanks for the great video! I have this working with a beacon. However it doesn't work with my generic smart watch. I have the correct Mac address. Any ideas? Also, I have a question. You only added the bluetooth_proxy to the Esp32. You don't have to add the esp32_ble_tracker component, do you?
A lot of watches will stop broadcasting beacons when they are paired with a phone.
@@HomeAutomationGuy That's was my fear. Also, I have a question. You only added the bluetooth_proxy component to the Esp32. You don't have to add the esp32_ble_tracker component, do you?
@@DS-cy6mf Bermuda doesn't seem to require the esp32_ble_tracker component.
My esp device just stays offline. What am I missing here to ensure it is online once it’s been adopted in home assistant? I have set a static ip. Is there something I need to do in the yaml of the device within esphome in HA?
Hi there. I am following your well written guide to try and set this up myself. However, I keep running into the same issue. I am able to successfully install ESPHome on my ESP32 device (just a generic once). After I adopt my ESP32 device in Home Assistant, I then try to install the new code with "bluetooth_proxy:" added to the configuration and I get this same error every single time: MissingPackageManifestError: Could not find one of 'package.json' manifest files in the package. I have even gone so far as to reinitialize and reinstall my ESP32 device from scratch. Any idea what is happening here?
9:26 some deep method acting here 😂
Joking aside, how does Bermuda deal with the tracked Bluetooth device not being detected by any of the configured proxies? Does it have a configurable timeout?
Did you have any issues with the distance being WILDLY wrong on your sensors? Using a Samsung S20 phone and a generic esp32 it reports me as being 52 feet away from the ESP when I'm about 6' away. I had this same issue with other presence sensors and am wondering if there are some esp boards with bad BT antennas or bad circuit design or something that's causing this kind of weird error
Different beacons show different distances for me, but never as big a discrepancy as you're reporting!
This is quite normal. There are a lot of things that affect how strong a signal is received, some a device-specific and some are environmental, and some are just random. Typically the distances are OK in a "relative" sense, but if you have different receiver device types this will be a bigger problem. In Bermuda there is a "Reference power" setting. You can adjust this so that your phone reads correctly at about 3ft, then you set the "attenuation" so that it reads correctly at a bigger distance (say, 20ft).
The next release (and the current beta, v0.6.9rc2) has/will have per-proxy calibration as well, which is helpful if you have different types of proxies working together.
Wow, 2 videos in two days! More tomorrow? I presume you could use a smart watch instead of the phones for tracking? I dont carry my phone with me all the time, and my wife definitely does not. We do have smart watches.
Don't forget to put the seat back down!
Some smart watches apparently work, and my Fitbit has a Tile built into it somehow which works too.
Two videos because I really had to get this Bluetooth one out. I didn't like that there was an old video of mine out there recommending something that no longer worked.
How do you get this from EP Lite, as can’t see Bluetooth on the device settings?
It comes as standard out of the box. You won’t see it in the config unless you follow the url in the ESPhome settings for it. There is a BT proxy and a non BT proxy url on the code owners site. My EPL kept going offline so I changed the settings url to pick the non BT proxy version and it’s been stable since (1 month or so)
I have a question... Let's say I want my ac to be at 24° when I am in my room... But now I changed it to 26° for my convenience... Will the automation will again change it to 24° after sometime as I am still in the room ? Or will not change it as I have entered the values manually ??
It will probably change it back to 24 when you leave and re-enter the room
@@HomeAutomationGuy
But isn't that a continuous loop to check if I'm in the room ?
And when it detects that I'm still in the room and the temperature is at 26... It won't change it ? As the conditions would be if I'm in the room set the temperature to 24 and it will after some internals checks if I'm in the room or not ? If not close the AC ? If I'm ? Change it to 24 ??
@@hrithikhu That depends on how you set up the automation.
@@HomeAutomationGuy
Can you please suggest the correct way then ?
@@hrithikhu The Home Assistant Community forums or Discord server would be a great place to go for advice for this. All the best with it!
Can this work with Apple or Android watches?
It works with some of them, check out the FAQ on the Bermuda BLE GitHub page for more information
“I use an Apple Watch s5/s7, and it works perfectly with this integration.”
Unfortunately, most non-apple watches stop being visible via BLE the moment they connect to your phone.
Does this work on IOS, I can't find Bluetooth in my sensors section?
Apparently it does work with iOS. There are instructions in the Bermuda FAQ on it's GitHub page.
those D1's you're showing won't work right? they don't have BT...
Mine do
@@HomeAutomationGuypossible, but the ones you show in the pic are wifi only. 😅
Is anyone able to recommend a suitable ESP32 device thats available in the UK. Or on aliexpress? New to ESP32 but this is the video thats drawn me in.
I use the M5 Stack devices and they're available to ship to the UK (as I also live here!)
Button for integration not working ...
This works great on my samsung s24 but on my girlfriends iphone 11 pro not. Any advice to get this working better? When the screen is off for a while the ble stops transmitting.
I'm not sure sorry, I don't have any iDevices. Perhaps the Bermuda GitHub page and issues list will have some ideas?
Have you got the "Private BLE Device" integration set up? It's by far the most reliable way to have iOS tracking (and it's great for Android) because iPhones do weird things when they sleep. Private BLE is likely to still detect the phone when it's asleep, since it will pick up *any* broadcasts it sends, not just the HA app's iBeacon packets. If you have a macbook the process is reasonably easy, if you don't then the Bermuda wiki has some pointers on ways to get the IRK (a key) that you need to get Private BLE Device working. Bermuda integrates automagically with Private BLE Device.
Great video! I installed all the software, but I can’t seem to locate my iPhone or Apple Watch. Those devices show what their Bluetooth IDs are, but those IDs not show up in the list of 47 devices that my Bluetooth proxy found. lightBlue shows my Apple Watch UU ID, but that doesn’t show up in the list of 47 devices either. Anyone have an idea what I’m missing?
I'm not sure, I don't have any Apple devices. Have you checked the FAQ on the Bermuda GitHub page?
If you're sending iBeacon UUIDs, then they should be in the top of the drop-down list in Bermuda. You can type part of a mac address or uuid into the box to shorten the list, sometimes it's hard to spot. If they're not there at all, you could try installing the v0.6.9rc2 version just to be sure you're on the latest, and send me the result of a "download diagnostics" as well as perhaps screenshots from lightBlue so I can see the current MAC and UUID for the device - you can upload that to the issues in Bermuda and I'll take a look to see what's going on.
Do you use ha cloud? If not how do you expose your ha to the internet. I personally use wireguard vpn to my local network. I'm hesitant to expose my instance to the internet. I don't trust ha that much to keep my network safe
Yes, I use HA Cloud by Nabu Casa
All these atom echo devices you bought as assist satellites but then it didn't work as expected because the mic and speaker are ridiculous. 😢
That's exactly what they are! I'm glad I finally found a way to re-purpose them
Too bad this doesn't also work with mmWave sensors. I plan on using BLE for devices to use with smart dashboards, but we don't usually move with our phones so I need mmWave to automatically turn off lights & air conditioning in empty rooms. Does anyone else have family members who are allergic to off switches?
I use mmWave and PIR sensors for turning on and off the lights and climate devices. I use the BLE for personalisation and the dashboard.
@@HomeAutomationGuy So mmWave works without the flash to ESPresense? That makes my shopping list a lot more manageable.
@@dspamers If you're talking about the Everything Presence sensors, yes. You don't need ESPresense anymore.
How do you get it to stop giving false readings like saying im in the living room when im actually in the kitchen???
Move your proxies, adjust the strength of your beacon, twiddle the Bermuda settings.
How do you make the automation that triggers on what area you're in? For me it only shows me the ability to put above or below distances, but you had your's set to just trigger based on whatever room your device says it's in. How did you do that?
How is the toilet today?
I regret the spicy food I ate last night 🔥
Dear Home automation guy.... you poopin?
Maybe...
For me it is not smart to carry a device all the time with me ...
I agree with that. But it's the best I can do with the technology I have. I don't want to install cameras inside my house to do facial recognition and implanting a BLE device under my skin is a bit Black Mirror.
@@HomeAutomationGuy Yes, I understand that, but I have children, for example, and no dog, and I don't want to tag them like that. My wife wants every smart device to work without a smartphone (I think that's smart too). It's not important to me where my children are, but that they have enough light and that there isn't a light on somewhere where no one is. I once heard that presence can also be measured using WiFi/Bluetooth waves, which I think is almost smarter.
Ohhh that's something totally different then. I use mmWave and Infrared sensors to detect presence and then the lights on for people in each room. The only difference is that it doesn't know WHO is in that room.
Check out my motion sensor videos on my channel, it covers it in a lot more detail
Commenting this purely to get a reply whilst pooping
Oh hai 💩
Heart this if you are pissing right now
💩
My wife doesn't carry a phone with her in the house, so I am going to attach a tag on her :>
As long as it's consensual ...
@@HomeAutomationGuy But it is just a pretty button!
Tracking your dog is the definition of doing way too much
Nah
My girlfriend would quickly disagree with you. Like Alan's, if she cant see her, shes probably doing something she shouldnt be. Having HA be able to keep an eye on wherever the 1.5yo puppy is, is a godsend