OpenHAB + motherboard Bluetooth adapter

Hi friends,

I’m running OpenHAB 4.2 as a docker app on Unraid.

I would like to use the Bluetooth binding to distinguish when my phone is home/away using the BLE beacon feature.

My system is running on a computer with a Gigabyte Z490i Aorus Ultra motherboard, which has a built-in Intel Bluetooth adapter.

Is it possible to give OpenHAB control of this Bluetooth adapter, so I can use it with the Bluetooth binding?

Hope someone can help :pray:

It’s possible but not easy.I gave it a try once and eventually gave up.

At a high level, you need to:

  • make sure that there is no BT stack running on the host (e.g. bluez)
  • start the container in privileged mode
  • add the BT stack to the container
  • make sure that dbus and the BT stack starts before OH in the container

There are other approaches too but all of them require building a custom image that includes all the BT stuff and making sure that BT is not running on the host.

I found it easier to just run another instance of OH on bare metal and used the Remote openHAB binding to sync it with the main OH instance running in OH. But I eventually gave up on that even in favor of Python scripts that publish to MQTT.

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