I have an ESPHome device that is operating as a "base station" hub for hosting a bunch of various sensors. Some of them are directly connected to the base station, others are remote BLE devices placed around the house. Is there any way to have HA treat these remote sensors as completely separate devices, instead of just showing up as part of the base station? Having it all show up as part of the base station has a few issues. For one, I can only assign the device to a single location, but the sensors are located all around the house, and for the sake of organization, as well as some automations, being able to assign the remote sensors to their own location would be beneficial. Also, the remote sensors are battery powered, and I have a blueprint that monitors battery powered devices to alert me if any of them need changing, but because all of these sensors are considered to be part of the base station entity (which is NOT battery powered), what ends up happening is that HA treats the base station as if it IS battery powered, using the battery level from the first sensor as its level reading. So, is there any way to do this? I get that the various sensors all directly connected to the base station could reasonably be considered to be part of the same physical device, and I have no problem with that, but for the remote BLE sensors, it really does kind of throw a wrench into things that they're treated as being part of the same device when they aren't.
#Any way to configure an ESPHome device as a "base station" with sensors as separate devices?
plucky stag
uncut root
I have an ESPHome device that is operating as a "base station" hub for hosting a...
yeah you could receive data by BLE or perhaps using ESP-NOW then report it back from a single ESP.
to show things in separate devices you can use sub-devices (this is a fairly new thing)
although for specifics this discussion might be better suited over on the ESPHome discord as people there might know more.
plucky stag
I thought about posting over in the ESPHome server, but my question was more specific to the way that HA treats the device. It's currently working fine as a single device, nothing wrong on the ESPHome side of things, it's just on the HA side I want it to be treated differently.
I'll check out sub-devices though, that sounds like it might be exactly what I want
Ok, yeah. 3 sentences in and that's exactly it. I guess the solution was on that end of things after all.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I don't think that existed when I first built my ESPHomeBase
uncut root
Ok, yeah. 3 sentences in and that's exactly it. I guess the solution was on tha...
yeah its a pretty new thing, only around maybe 2 or 3 months.
plucky stag
I kind of had a feeling in the back of my mind that if the answer was no, then it would probably need something like that done on their end to implement it cleanly without a lot of ugly hacks.
uncut root
i dont have a esphome example but heres a shelly that shows different circuits its monitoring as different sub devices
the sub devices can then be assigned to different zones etc...
plucky stag
Cool, I'll start playing around with that and try setting up a new config around it. Of course, that'll mean also updating all of my automations and dashboard widgets to point to the new devices, but oh well, that's just how automation goes, right? You spend all of your time managing the automation instead of the original task? 😛
plucky stag
thanks again
plucky stag
Boom
cloud dock
The other way to achieve this is to use your original base station as a bluetooth proxy, and let it forward the bluetooth broadcasts directly to Home Assistant. Then each ATC device automatically gets discovered as a separate device, and gets it own area, etc, tags. It also simplifies your ESPHome device configuration.
This has been possible for quite a while now.