I have some questions about Hubitat: Bluetooth and Rules

I already placed something in the category "Why HE" because I do not want to get off topic here.

I'm not all that familiar with BLE developments - are there (fairly) mature presence solutions that leverage BLE? What's the scope? I think it would be really useful to be able to identify the location of things and people within the house - right now I think most of us rely on motion sensors for that. There has been some discussion about whether it would be feasible to use environmental monitoring - temperature, CO2 concentration, etc. to determine presence of people/animals.

I was a backer of the Atlas project that TrackR was working in to do just that based on phone BLE but it just wasn’t accurate so they abandoned the project and refunded backers.

Interesting. Thanks!

Triangulation based on disruption of Wi-Fi signals is an interesting concept, but this has proved to be just as challenging for researchers.

For now the lack of BT is the only reason holding me to order HE.
All other things look fine to me including the community.

You posted essentially the same question in 3 different threads, I have combined them here.

2 Likes

And my apologies, I posted comments and questions to those in several different places. Thanks for reorganizing it!

@cendeni Who's BT enabled blinds are you talking about? MySmartBlinds?

1 Like

Something like MySmartBlinds but other manufacturer.

About presence detection:
I want to know if family member is at home or is the house abandoned.
If there is a member at home, is someone still awake or all sleeping (home and awake or home and sleeping)
Main reason for this is alarmsystem.
GPS is inaccurate (geo fencefield is too big), wifi is not reliable because phone is asleep and we are awake. I know BT might be not reliable either.
I solved it now with wifi for home and awake mode, wallplug with powermeter when phone plugged in for home and asleep mode.

What manufacturer? Maybe if you're specific somebody may have something to suggest.

And what other Bluetooth devices? Outside a few specific use cases (for example I have some Parrot Flower Power and Xiaomi MiFlora Sensors), BT is a horrible technology for Home Automation IMO. But perhaps you have some awesome BT devices that may make us all think differently?

No BT to WiFi bridge? Is there Google Assistant support if they do have a bridge? If so there’s a way.

What brand and type of blinds? There might be options some us know about, but without the brand, we’re not going to be able to help as effectively.

Can you identify a similar hub (SmartThings, Vera, HomeSeer, Wink, etc.) that works with arbitrary Bluetooth devices in a manner like you suggest? The SmartThings v2 hub had a BT radio that was never enabled, and I don't blame them. It would be quite difficult to create a Z-Wave- and Zigbee-like experience with Bluetooth due to wildly varying manufacturer implementations (Z-Wave, for example, is quite standardized at the application level).

If you're familiar with Switchmate, originally an "over the existing switch"-type Bluetooth smart switch (think the RealitySwitch or Ecolink TLS-ZWAVE5 but Bluetooth), pretty much any effort done to use it in other home automation platforms has to be done by reverse-engineering and at the mercy of firmware upgrades that might change things--see the issues this project had for a while: Switchmate firmware update broke this script! · Issue #6 · brianpeiris/switchmate · GitHub. I do see Home Assistant included support for these late last year (apparently directly via BT, not a Switchmate WiFi bridge, which they also now have), but I don't know how well it works.

tl;dr doing this is hard. :slight_smile:

1 Like

This helpful community is great and very helpful, almost makes me buy HE.
I already had the blinds. I could not find affordable and suitable motor. So I ended up with teptronic for my blinds to raise/lower and to tilt.

@martyn
IMHO home automation is to get all kinds of devices automated no matter what brand or protocol. But I prefer one hub (or system) and not many for each brand or protocol.
BT is not that bad for sound (just my opinion) so the other devices are mainly BT speakers. Why Sonos like brands when there is cheap BT?
Maybe use my phone BT for presence detection.

@SmartHomePrimer
Please no Google, no IFTT.
I appreciate my freedom.

So right now the blinds can be controlled from the Teptron App on your phone, correct? And that app is apparently using BLE to communicate to the blind motor controller.

Found this:

"Nice, welcome to the club :wink:

The regular "move" is bluetooth connected, the "movez" has a Z-wave connection and was updated last month to have a bluetooth connection as well.

Bluetooth connected sounds nice and easy, but in reality you'll need something that can talk to each individual device specifically. Usually that means that you have to use the app that comes with the device and that it is hard to control it any other way like with a Smartthings controller. That usually only is possible if the company or someone else writes a plugin for it. Otherwise you would have to come up with some construction to control it via your phone in combination with Tasker or something like that. Not ideal.

Z-Wave on the other hand has some standards that companies have to work by, and that makes it work with nearly every z-wave controller out of the box. Your best bet is this option, since it will always work with your controller, no matter where you or your phone are. I for example want my blinds to close automatically when I leave the house and it is dark outside."

And:

"(https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/6693ld/has_anyone_tried_the_treptron_move_for_automated/dghbxk9/)

that is possible, some tweakers reverse engineered the protocol (adding some 0x73 magic..) see: csrmesh/README.md at master · t0mas/csrmesh · GitHub

I actually integrated it with homekit, using raspberry pi running homebridge.. the units are not always responsive, but thats the same issue in the app I guess

I think its good value for money, I recommend to leverage the micro usb connector to sort the power"

So Teptron has left you on an island with no kind of bridge. Been there. Those products are dead to me. You don't want to go out to the cloud, so your best bet, and easier to implement is going to be Tasker on an Android phone. Or solder wires onto the buttons and control it with something like a Qubino Flush 2. Since it's three buttons (raise, lower and stop I'm assuming), then you'll need a Qubino Flush 1 as well. Where in the world are you, US, Canada, Europe, Australia, or other?

Are these roller blinds? How much do you have invested in this? Maybe you just want to get the IKEA Trådfri blinds when they come out in the fall. They will use Zigbee, so it's very likely that community and/or official drivers will be available not long after.

I'm seeing press releases that they are supposed to be out this week. Unless it's an April Fool's joke.

1 Like