BTHome receiver and ESPNow+BTHome receiver and transmitter | ESPHome | Page 1

junior flower Jun 24, 2023, 7:51 PM

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Meet project Beethowen, my latest development that mplements ian energy efficient component to transfer data over ESP-NOW Communication Protocol over BTHome protocol, and bthome_receiver component that enables anonymous reception on an ESP32 ESPHome node from remote devices.

Beethowen could enable 3-9 years of smart home sensor lifespan and easy development to everyone.
https://medium.com/@attila.farago.hu/implementing-low-energy-smart-devices-with-several-years-of-independence-970077900cf4

Github open source repository: https://github.com/afarago/esphome_component_bthome

Any comments, suggestions are welcome -- this is a quite new concept for me and as development is in progress and might not come in the best structure yet.

cursive sedge Jun 25, 2023, 2:01 AM

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Interesting, I like that you have used bthome over espnow, and that could be a great start to getting espnow actually merged into the codebase.

copper kettle Jun 25, 2023, 2:04 AM

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Instead of having a bthome_receiver ESPHome node, users can leverage today our bluetooth proxy, and use the BTHome integration in HA to process the BLE packages

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very cool

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btw

brave hamlet Jun 25, 2023, 3:10 AM

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That definitely sounds as a cool idea to reuse BTHome serialization with another transport! I'm wondering though what benefits ESP-NOW offers over BLE? AFAIK, ESP-NOW uses Wi-Fi frequencies so I'd imagine its main advantage is router-less communication with Wi-Fi speed/range (or so), but that doesn't seem to give any benefits when optimizing for power consumption. 🤔 Or am I missing something?

buoyant plinth Jun 25, 2023, 5:02 AM

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brave hamlet That definitely sounds as a cool idea to reuse BTHome serialization with another...

There's no negotiation. It's a broadcast protocol. So you turn on the wifi, send the data, then turn off the wifi. Very much faster than normal wifi.

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Very similar to BLE in that way.

frigid frost Jun 25, 2023, 5:27 AM

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So what’s the advantage of implementing espnow on an esp32, vs using the also-existing BLE peripheral? Is it range? Bluetooth is limited to around 30m as I understand, espnow should get quite a bit more than that, possibly at the expense of battery life.

buoyant plinth Jun 25, 2023, 5:29 AM

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espnow range is pretty good from what I've heard.

cursive sedge Jun 25, 2023, 6:47 AM

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It can also work from esp8266 to esp32

junior flower Jun 25, 2023, 7:49 AM

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benefits of ESP-NOW over BLE are

ESP8266 (potential for any old e.g. Shelly gen 1 device)
on ESP32 we could explore WIFI_PROTOCOL_LR for 800m-1000m range. 😉

junior flower Jun 25, 2023, 7:50 AM

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copper kettle Instead of having a `bthome_receiver` ESPHome node, users can leverage today our...

Yes, exactly, that's my current setup. However there is a discussion/requdst for local independent decoding.

Theoretically it would be an awesome opportunity to translate and "proxy" messages coming from an ESP8266 node to the HA.
Later on I plan to look into this option. Any help would be appreciated.

frigid frost Jun 25, 2023, 8:14 AM

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There are lots of discussions about making entities on one node available to other nodes without going through HA. At the moment that is done very piecemeal - e.g. BLE nodes can pair, and make e.g. a temperature and humidity available in ESPHome. It would be great to be able to define a "remote entity" with an identifier of some sort (hand waving) that gets updated through "some remote protocol" (seems like an opportunity for an interface here).
Then the entity could be "uninitialised" if no updates have come in since boot, or potentially stale if there has been a large gap in updates.
But this also looks like an opportunity for a generic proxy functionality. Either as a binary blob, and the details of the transport are provided in an envelope, that could carry ESPNow/BTHome messages, or BLE/broadcast messages, or LoRa/whatever messages.
Then the node could optionally have a parser for those message formats, which could be fed into any locally defined entities that match the identifier.

brave hamlet Jun 25, 2023, 12:53 PM

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buoyant plinth Very similar to BLE in that way.

I get that, but now if we forget about WiFi and just compare ESP-NOW and BLE - my uneducated guess assumes that ESP-NOW consumes more energy [because it uses the Wi-Fi radio module that is more powerful than BLE]. So I'm trying to understand if I'm missing something here?

brave hamlet Jun 25, 2023, 12:56 PM

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junior flower benefits of ESP-NOW over BLE are - ESP8266 (potential for any old e.g. Shelly ge...

I see, so it sounds like primary advantages are device support and range, right? Power consumptions just better than Wi-Fi [but is likely to be not as good as BLE?].

junior flower Jun 25, 2023, 2:17 PM

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Example for BTHome injection uploading here as hastebin will expire - #general-support message

📎 beethowen_send_test.yaml

buoyant plinth Jun 25, 2023, 5:39 PM

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brave hamlet I see, so it sounds like primary advantages are device support and range, right?...

Yes

cobalt burrow Jun 26, 2023, 8:45 AM

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copper kettle Instead of having a `bthome_receiver` ESPHome node, users can leverage today our...

The whole point is not to have to put HA in between - so you can reliably transfer data from one ESPHome data to another directly.

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A very common use case is when you have a lot of BTHome temp sensors and want to use Thermostats implemented in ESPHome having to relay the data through HA is an extra point of failure.
HA only needs to deal with control of the Thermostat entities only. And even with HA down, the Thermostats continue to operate by hardware.

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bthome_receiver should be also natilvely supported by ESPHome, just like Xiaomi BLE and the many other Bluetooth sensors - so people could have an option for that too.

arctic hawk Jun 29, 2023, 4:03 PM

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One question: does this new BTHome protocol include encryption? Or just sends the data unencrypted. I want to test it on remote for opening a garage door, but security is needed for reasons :).

copper kettle Jun 29, 2023, 5:23 PM

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BTHome supports encryption

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in the standard

frigid frost Jun 29, 2023, 5:50 PM

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it doesn't seem like BTHome is suitable for any control messages, though? Only broadcasting of state.

copper kettle Jun 29, 2023, 6:03 PM

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correct

arctic hawk Jun 29, 2023, 7:35 PM

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So a simple button_pressed = true can be transmitter true it right?

copper kettle Jun 30, 2023, 1:14 AM

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Yes. See bthome.io

frigid frost Jun 30, 2023, 4:09 AM

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Yeah, my apologies. I thought you were making the controller use bthome, not a trigger. Perfectly suitable for a trigger.

junior flower Jul 1, 2023, 9:56 PM

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Good news, had some time and added/verified ESP32 support. 😎
Some fine tuning went to the configuration structure.

Plans include:

looking into the ESPHome 16-byte encryption soon, until then a simple 2-byte identified is added.
auto-forward received packages to HA (using BTHome integration and HA-API)
BTHome events, though how to expose them through esphome is not clear - perhaps a direct HA-API call would be the best option

Here are the simplified configuration files/options.

📎 beethowen_remote.yaml 📎 beethowen_server.yaml 📎 bthome.yaml

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Does anyone have ideas on reducing the cycle time / any analysis of an ESP8266 or ESP32 shortest boot time over ESPHome?
As of now I have with a d1 mini ESP8266 - boot+bmp085 temp reading+ADC reading+wifi wakeup+espnow send = ~280 ms.

I'd be keen to reduce that to below 200 ms if possible.

earnest skiff Jul 10, 2023, 4:46 AM

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Came across this when trying to set up plain ordinary BTHome over BLE... do I understand correctly that this code or something like it will do the trick? #1122252736398897262 message

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(In my case I want to use it for HA Glow, so an ESP32 is already necessary)

junior flower Jul 18, 2023, 8:09 PM

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This component can receive BTHome over BLE locally

#BTHome receiver and ESPNow+BTHome receiver and transmitter