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formatBCE / Airbnk-MQTTOpenGateway

Gateway to use Airbnk locks with HA custom integration https://github.com/rospogrigio/airbnk_mqtt
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Hardware recommendations? #13

Open jamenlang opened 1 year ago

jamenlang commented 1 year ago

I just got one of the wehere bluetooth locks and I'm very interested in connecting it to my Home Assistant, but I've never used ESPHome or Arduinos.

please, if you can give me a known working hardware recommendation to get me part way started I would appreciate it.

Why can an android device connect to and control the lock, but any other bluetooth le device needs to be or emulate a BT LE gateway?

formatBCE commented 1 year ago

Hi!

I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with ESPHome - it's amazing, and not only works with bare metal devices, but also supports wide range of vendor-locked WiFi devices, making them truly yours - like sockets, line breakers, and many-many more.

To your questions: get some ESP32 board from Amazon. I used these: https://a.co/d/4H5l2Qw, ESP32-MINI from AliExpress, and ESP32-C3 from Screek - they all do job.

When you're talking about BLE, usually it's so-called server devices. They have some defined "characteristics", endpoints, that clients can connect to.

Server can't connect to another server - you need client for this, and it's different role in BLE world. Android can do both - it's powerful device with a lot inside.

For our lock we're creating client on ESP32, that connects to the lock server, and writes commands there - and, simultaneously, listens to lock broadcast informational messages (advertisements, adv). Then it communicates to HA via WiFi, translating lock data to HA integration.

jamenlang commented 1 year ago

Thank you for the clarifications