I’ve been working on a project to extend the Bluetooth range of my Home Assistant setup, and I wanted to share my experience and a question I have. I’ve set up a secondary Hass.io RPi to handle Bluetooth device tracking and use MQTT State Stream to sync the data back to my main HA instance. It’s working well in most cases, but there’s this odd behavior I’m trying to figure out.
Here’s the setup: I have two phones tracked via Bluetooth. The idea is that if either phone moves away from home, it should update their respective device_tracker states. However, what’s happening is if one phone goes away, both phones are marked as away, even if one is still home. This is a bit confusing because the logs show only one MQTT topic being updated. I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing in the configuration or if there’s a known limitation with MQTT State Stream in this context.
On the remote RPi, my mqtt_statestream config is set up to publish attributes and timestamps, and it’s tracking Bluetooth devices every 15 seconds. On the main HA Docker, I’ve configured it to listen for the specific MQTT topics for each phone. The setup seems correct, but the behavior is unexpected.
I’d love to hear if anyone else has encountered this or has any insights. Maybe there’s a tweak in the configuration or a different approach to handling multiple Bluetooth devices that I haven’t considered yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated!