Private BLE Device issue

[stark osprey]

I've been trying to get general presence right in our home and found that the Private BLE Device is a great option for this as my house is full of shellies.

However, i noticed something odd, my partner was away (like 50KM away) and the integration suddenly reported her as home for 18 minutes within the span of 4 hours. Looking back into the history and i'm seeing a trend in this behavior, this does not appear to be an incident.

It is possible that she was working on the to-do list while in the train but as this is BLE presence this should not have the entity report her as 'home' while doing so.

I'm not sure how i would go about troubleshooting something like this and would love some tips on making this more reliable.

my use case for this is to combine multiple device trackers to get a more accurate picture of presence. WiFi is slow to report 'home' but is reliable, i am looking for something that is very fast like BLE but it's useless if things like this happen.

[hallow turret]

Never seen this happen

I combine my watch and phone to hedge against failure, and the only trouble I have is there is a dead zone in the corner of one room and if I sit there the house alarm arms itself. Never have false disarms.

One big difference I guess is i use esphome rather than Shelly, so that might be one thing to rule out I guess

The integration itself can’t really imagine devices, it gets a fire hose of Bluetooth data from the scanners and checks each device seen and it applies a cryptography check on each Bluetooth address. It’s very unlikely that you’d randomly get a match, and you should buy a lottery ticket if that were happening multiple times. So if it was really broken I’d expect it would be a scanner sending a discovery for an old device, so Shelly sticks out as something I’ve not specifically got in my setup where it’s working fine.

The signal strength sensor could be useful here, if it’s a single Shelly emitting a stale record then the signal graph will be flat.

I think the tracker itself has an attribute that tells you which proxy it is currently tracked by. If it’s always the same one, that could also be useful. Turn it off if you can.