Home Assistant Bluetooth integration

Project help
1

I have recently purchased an Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC BLE temperature and humidity sensor, I would like to connect this device to my Home Assistant system.

Therefore, I would like to enable Bluetooth integration to Home Assistant. When I attempt to add the integration it says:

No unconfigured Bluetooth adapters found

There is a help link that points to Bluetooth - Home Assistant and I believe Balena would fall under this.

  • Home Assistant Container: The host system must run BlueZ, and the D-Bus socket must be accessible to Home Assistant inside the container.

I believe D-Bus access is achieved by adding the io.balena.features.dbus: '1' label to homeassistant service in docker-compose.yml.

But, I don’t know how to run bluez on the host system. I have tried adding RUN commands to the Dockerfile but nothing is right:

e.g.

FROM homeassistant/home-assistant:stable

COPY start.sh /tmp/start.sh

RUN apt install bluez

RUN chmod +x /tmp/start.sh

CMD ["bash","/tmp/start.sh"]

But balena push attempts respond with /bin/ash: apt: not found

2

I have connected to the Host serial console and noticed there are hci tools already installed, from there I was able to run hcitool lescan and the device I want to connect to is discovered:

root@2b97a16:~# hcitool lescan
LE Scan ...
...
A4:C1:38:F3:FA:1B ATC_F3FA1B

This tells me bluetooth already is available to the host … So why am I unable to detect the BLE device in Home Assistant :-/

4

Hello, the io.balena.features.dbus: '1' is a good start, but I think you also need to specify DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS env variable, see : Communicate outside the container - Balena Documentation - You may also want to check out our Bluetooth block GitHub - balena-labs-projects/bluetooth: Optimized bluetooth agent for balenaOS. Based on BlueZ 5.0. for an example of BlueZ on balena which you could use or adapt for your use.

5

Thanks, I didn’t know about setting the D_BUS environment variable, that page too looks like a great source.

7

I was interested by the bluetooth block too, but wasn’t sure how or if that would work with the homeassistant service.

8

You may also find the explanations and suggestions in this similar post helpful: Configure Bluez on Host OS from Container

9

I wanted to use the dbus and bluetooth blocks so added those first, but could not get anything on home assistant to work. After that I instead simply added the environment variable and it worked, without the aforementioned blocks. I feel like the blocks is the Balena way to do things so it was a shame this did not easily work [but I blame my lack of working knowledge of blocks for that].

11

I added the PVVX firmware to the sensor and have been able to add as a BTHome integration.

I do notice this error and warnings though:

 homeassistant  2023-01-01 23:53:05.692 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.bluetooth.scanner] hci0 (B8:27:EB:0E:64:EC): Error stopping scanner: [org.bluez.Error.InProgress] Operation already in progress
 homeassistant  2023-01-01 23:53:05.702 WARNING (MainThread) [bluetooth_auto_recovery.recover] Getting Bluetooth adapter failed hci0 [B8:27:EB:0E:64:EC] because the system cannot create a bluetooth socket: Unable to open PF_BLUETOOTH socket
 homeassistant  2023-01-01 23:53:05.707 WARNING (MainThread) [bluetooth_auto_recovery.recover] Could not find adapter with mac address B8:27:EB:0E:64:EC or hci0
 homeassistant  2023-01-01 23:53:05.712 WARNING (MainThread) [bluetooth_auto_recovery.recover] Closing Bluetooth adapter hci0 [B8:27:EB:0E:64:EC] failed: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'detach'

Would be nicer if they didn’t exist.