Cheap Bluetooth antenna with raspberry pi zero

Hardware Home Automation
21

???

reelActive has a central server and clients. Each client uses its own BT device and reports the signal strength of all the BT devices that it sees. The server looks at all the reports from all the clients and reports to OH which client has the strongest signal and therefore telling you which room the BT device is in. It solves EXACTLY your problem.

Similarly, sensorReporter is designed to run on more than one Raspberry Pi (or other computers) and report to OH when it can see a BT device. Slight modifications will let it report the RSSI (Iā€™d even make the modifications for you). So sensorReporter nearly solves EXACTLY your problem, though determining which RPi the BT device is closest to will have to be done by Rules.

Somewhat differently, FIND triangulates the location of your phone based on the signal strength of all the wifi APs the phone can see. So this solves your problem, but uses wifi instead of BT.

There is no limitation to connecting to only one BT device in ANY of these solutions.

22

Just so you know guys @rlkoshak @clempat, the 3rd party bluetooth binding is supposed to do indoor positioning as well. It accumulates RSSI readings from all adapters and calculates shortest distance from bt device to installed adapters. Obviously you will need to have an adapter in each room.

23

What kind of adapters you are using? Generic USB or BlueGiga?

24

Do you really use a BlueGiga Adapter? and did you get data on your raspi zero? I have the strong feeling, that the onboard bluetooth ist a generic bluetooth device and with this ser2net will not work.

25

Sorry I meant for exemple I have a Bluetooth temperature Sensor (Xiaomi). I would be interested to get the data from it instead of the signal and the presence. And for this reason I would need to use the Bluetooth binding solution.

26

I think you are both right and point on the right direction. I use the built in raspberry pi Bluetooth :upside_down_face:

Damn I wish I would have it working. It is the only limitation I found yet to move my system to openhab.

27

Iā€™m aware of that. Iā€™m also aware of the challenges of getting it to work in Docker, hence my recommendation.

28

@vkolotov As you are here. First thanks for the awesome work you did for the Bluetooth binding. Here is how I stand now:
I have a raspberry pi zero with ser2net exposing the serial I think is the built in Bluetooth.
I have a machine with docker and running socat and openhab. I made a custom image for that here: https://hub.docker.com/r/clempat/openhab-socat/
I see /dev/tryNET0 as said in my last message. Is the 3rd party Bluetooth integration a solution for me or I need to look somewhere else ?

29

hi @clempat, the internal bluetooth adapter is not serial port based device (unlike BlueGiga devices). You will have to use something different rather than ser2net, that allows you to create a virtual usb port over ip.

@Dibbler42, has created a manual how to do so: Forwarding of serial and USB ports over the network to openHAB

If you had a BluGiga adapter, then you would be able to use ser2net.

30

@clempat Than you can use the usbip solution from my tutorial. The docker parts ist this still open

31

Great I will try it tonight. And share againā€¦ Thanks for the help sorry for spamming you :slight_smile:

32

you are welcome :slight_smile:

33

Did you finally have success? i just bought as pi zero W, but did not manage to propagate the bluetooth to the central openHAb instance.

34

Hello, i could not have it work. As deported solution I did have one success with zwave but not the Bluetooth. I donā€™t remember where I was blocking. I am now using mqtt solutionsā€¦