Bermuda BLE Trilateration

• Track bluetooth devices by Area (Room) in HomeAssistant, using ESPHome bluetooth_proxy devices.

• (eventually) Triangulate device positions! Like, on a map. Maybe.

What it does:

Bermuda aims to let you track any bluetooth device, and have Homeassistant tell you where in your house that device is. The only extra hardware you need are esp32 devices running esphome that act as bluetooth proxies. Alternatively, Shelly Plus devices can also perform this function.

• Area-based device location (ie, device-level room prescence) is working reasonably well.
• Creates sensors for Area and Distance for devices you choose
• Supports iBeacon devices, including those with randomised MAC addresses (like Android phones running HA Companion App)
• Supports IRK (resolvable keys) via the Private BLE Device core component. Once your iOS device (or Android!) is set up in Private BLE Device, it will automatically receive Bermuda sensors as well!
• Creates device_tracker entities for chosen devices, which can be linked to "Person"s for Home/Not Home tracking
• Configurable settings for rssi reference level, environmental attenuation, max tracking radius
• Provides a comprehensive json/yaml dump of devices and their distances from each bluetooth receiver, via the bermuda.dump_devices service.

What you need:

• One or more devices providing bluetooth proxy information to HA using esphome's bluetooth_proxy component. I like the D1-Mini32 boards because they're cheap and easy to deploy. The Shelly Plus bluetooth proxy devices are reported to work well. Only natively-supported bluetooth devices are supported, meaning there's no current or planned support for MQTT devices etc.

• USB Bluetooth on your HA host is not ideal, since it does not timestamp the advertisement packets. However it can be used for simple "Home/Not Home" tracking, and Area distance support is enabled currently.

• Some bluetooth BLE devices you want to track. Smart watches, beacon tiles, thermometers etc

• Install Bermuda via HACS:

Documentation and help - the Wiki

See The Wiki for more info on how it works and how to configure Bermuda for your home.

Screenshots

After installing, the integration should be visible in Settings, Devices & Services

Press the CONFIGURE button to see the configuration dialog. At the bottom is a field where you can enter/list any bluetooth devices the system can see. Choosing devices will add them to the configured devices list and creating sensor entities for them. See How Do The Settings Work? for more info.

Choosing the device screen shows the current sensors and other info. Note that there are extra sensors in the "not shown" section that are disabled by default (the screenshot shows several of these enabled already). You can edit the properties of these to enable them for more detailed data on your device locations. This is primarily intended for troubleshooting or development, though.

The sensor information also includes attributes area name and id, relevant MAC addresses etc.

In Settings, People, you can define any Bermuda device to track home/away status for any person/user.

FAQ

See The FAQ in the Wiki!

TODO / Ideas

• Switch to performing updates on receipt of advertisements, instead of periodic polling (nope, intervals work better)
• "Solve" realtime approximation of inter-proxy distances using Triangle Inequality
• Resolve x/y co-ordinates of all scanners and proxies (!)
• Some sort of map, just pick two proxies as an x-axis vector and go
• Config setting to define absolute locations of two proxies
• Support some way to "pin" more than two proxies/tags, and have it not break.
• An interface to define Areas in relation to the pinned proxies
• Experiment with some of these algo's for improving accuracy (too much math for me!). Particularly weighting shorter distances higher and perhaps the cosine similarity fingerprinting, possibly against fixed beacons as well to smooth environmental rssi fluctuations.

Hacking tips

Wanna improve this? Awesome! Bear in mind this is my first ever HA integration, and I'm much more greybeard sysadmin than programmer, so ifwhere I'm doing stupid things I really would welcome some improvements!

You can start by using the service bermuda.dump_devices to examine the internal state.

Using bermuda.dump_devices service

Just calling the service bermuda.dump_devices will give you a full dump of the internal data structures that bermuda uses to track and calculate its state. This can be helpful for working out what's going on and troubleshooting, or to use if you have a very custom need that you can solve with template sensors etc.

If called with no parameters, the service will return all data. parameters are available which let you limit or reformat the resulting data to make it easier to work with. In particular the addresses parameter is helpful to only return data relevant for one or more MAC addresses (or iBeacon UUIDs). See the information on parameters in the Services page in home assistant, under Developer Tools.

Important: If you decide to use the results of this call for your own templates etc, bear in mind that the format might change in any release, and won't necessarily be considered a "breaking change". This is beacuse the structure is used internally, rather than being a published API. That said, efforts will be made to indicate in the release notes if fields in the structure are renamed or moved, but not for adding new items.

Prior Art

The bluetooth_tracker and ble_tracker integrations are only built to give a "home/not home" determination, and don't do "Area" based location. (nb: "Zones" are places outside the home, while "Areas" are rooms/areas inside the home). I wanted to be free to experiment with this in ways that might not suit core, but hopefully at least some of this could find a home in the core codebase one day.

The "monitor" script uses standalone Pi's to gather bluetooth data and then pumps it into MQTT. It doesn't use the bluetooth_proxy capabilities which I feel are the future of home bluetooth networking (well, it is for my home, anyway!).

ESPresense looks cool, but I don't want to dedicate my nodes to non-esphome use, and again it doesn't leverage the bluetooth proxy features now in HA. I am probably reinventing a fair amount of ESPresense's wheel.

Installation

Definitely use the HACS interface! Once you have HACS installed, go to Integrations, click the meatballs menu in the top right, and choose Custom Repositories. Paste agittins/bermuda into the Repository field, and choose Integration for the Category. Click Add.

You should now be able to add the Bermuda BLE Trilateration integration. Once you have done that, you need to restart Homeassistant, then in Settings, Devices & Services choose Add Integration and search for Bermuda BLE Trilateration. It's possible that it will autodetect for you just by noticing nearby bluetooth devices.

Once the integration is added, you need to set up your devices by clicking Configure in Devices and Services, Bermuda BLE Trilateration.

In the Configuration dialog, you can choose which bluetooth devices you would like the integration to track.

The instructions below are the generic notes from the template:

1. Using the tool of choice open the directory (folder) for your HA configuration (where you find configuration.yaml).
2. If you do not have a custom_components directory (folder) there, you need to create it.
3. In the custom_components directory (folder) create a new folder called bermuda.
4. Download all the files from the custom_components/bermuda/ directory (folder) in this repository.
5. Place the files you downloaded in the new directory (folder) you created.
6. Restart Home Assistant
7. In the HA UI go to "Configuration" -> "Integrations" click "+" and search for "Bermuda BLE Trilateration"

Contributions are welcome!

If you want to contribute to this please read the Contribution guidelines

Credits

This project was generated from @oncleben31's Home Assistant Custom Component Cookiecutter template.

Code template was mainly taken from @Ludeeus's integration_blueprint template Cookiecutter User Guide**

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