homebridge-ble-adv

A Homebridge plugin to convert BLE advertisements to smart devices.

This plugin can be used for your ESP32 battery-operated projects. You can just broadcast a BLE advertisement without maintaining the constant connection.

So you can use deep sleep of the ESP32 and also the latency will still be pretty low (<300ms if the ESP32 is about 5m from the receiver in my experience).

This plugin constantly listens for BLE advertisements and if it detects one, it sends a "single click" event to Apple Home.

Configuration

{
  "platforms": [
       {
            "buttons": [
                {
                    "name": "Play",
                    "deviceName": "ESP32BUT2980",
                    "buttonPressAdvPattern": "2;.*"
                },
                {
                    "name": "Pauza",
                    "deviceName": "ESP32BUT2980",
                    "buttonPressAdvPattern": "1;.*"
                }
            ],
            "platform": "BLEAdvHomebridgePlatform"
        }
    ]
}

| Property | Description | |-|-| | name | Button name. This is the name that will be visible in Apple Home. Note: Duplicate names are not allowed. | | deviceName | Bluetooth device local name. The plugin will listen for advertisements of this device. | | buttonPressAdvPattern | Regex used to match the manufacturerData of the advertisements. For example: You may use a single ESP32 to make 3 smart buttons. This pattern is used to match each of them, even if the deviceName is the same. |

Note: This plugin has retransmission detection. It WILL IGNORE DUPLICATE ADVERTISEMENTS. This means you can broadcast the advertisement continuously for 2s to make sure the signal is received.

Personally I just generate a random number with each button press and append the number at the end of the manufacturerData. Example ESP32-C3 code

This is how the above configuration will look like in Apple Home:

How to find out the BLE device name? Or if it actually advertises?

Install @abandonware/noble

npm install -g @abandonware/noble

Then run ble_test.js.

node ble_test.js

It will scan for advertisements and show them in real time.

Hit ctrl+c to stop listening.

To make the output more readable, edit uncomment line 11 and edit it so it will match your device name:

    if (!localName.startsWith("ESP32")) return;

In my case the device name starts with ESP32, so I wanted to detect if I got the whole deviceName correctly or if the advertisement is actually detected.