Hi Lewis! Thanks for creating such brilliant content. Your content is insightful and entertaining, and you have a great voice to listen to. Congrats and thanks for sharing your knowledge. I have a couple of questions. Recently started dipping my foot into Home Assistant after using Hubitat for a while. Currently I'm using Home Assistant with Hubitat integrated via HACs. This seems to work fairly flawlessly. As I already have the Hubitat hub, do you think there's must reason to invest in a Zigbee dongle and connect everything directly to my Home Assistant instance? Secondly, following your great video, I recently installed Tailscale on my Home Assistant instance and noted the option to connect to other devices on the network. Sure enough, when connected to the VPN I am able to access Hubitat via my IP address. I can access everything on my network, which is great. But, how does this work!? Many thanks, and please keep up the great content!

Thanks for the video! I am going all Bluetooth in my home. That’s mainly because the home I’m building is mobile. I’m currently converting a short school bus into my mobile home. Because I can’t guarantee internet access everywhere I’m going all internal networked smart options. And it seems bluetooth is the best universal smart device connector that can work with out any outside internet connections.

Very informative!

Thank you.

Hi Lewis, thank you very much for sharing these great videos, the information you provide is always super accurate and concise which has helped me a lot in my process of making my home and business smart. Lately we have had some security problems in the store and thanks to my security system made with Home Assistant, Frigate and Alarmo I was able to prevent a robbery attempt, the thieves managed to enter but ran away when a motion sensor triggered the alarm, but sadly they didn't walk by the camera so Frigate didn't send me the photo. The police captured some suspects but since there was no evidence that they where inside the store, they had to release them. Is it possible to use bluetooth in Home Assistant to make a list of the devices that are in range when the alarm is activated? The suspects had phones so one of them probably had bluetooth on and saving the address could be used as proof that they were at the site. Do you think this is possible? Could you make a video on the subject or at least tell me where can I get information to do it? Once again, thank you very much for such an excellent job.

Bluetooth, an old friend joining the future. One of the applications where Bluetooth stand out from the crowd is room presence (short range is useful here) and beacons in general. Again thank you so much for this helpful series

Thanks for the vids. I can't seem to find a way of controlling my BLE lights from HA. It seems odd that I can from a phone with an app but not from HA. I'm new to HA am I missing something or could you please direct me to some answers on this. It looks like the only way forward is to get a hub to do it for me. But that seems like an expense that could be avoided. Any ideas?

Smart, nerdy and adorable. Great content.

Hi, I've recently put together my first box running on Home Assistant , I'm trying to find a way to connect my Bluetooth speaker (sony SRS-XB13). While I use the Passive BLE monitor for my switchbot , I don't see a bluetooth scanner for speakers , am I missing sometthing ? Thanks for all the videos, I just wanted to get some info on how to automate one little thing and I'm ending up with a new hobby !!!! lol

I would love a comparison in price and battery life for outdoor sensors (temp and humidity in particular) I'm looking for the best cost effective way to monitor multiple animal houses. BLE "blobs" can be small, sturdy, and weather proof, but can I get the same small size, IP-rating, and battery life with Z-wave/Zigbee sensors?

One area where BLE is better than all the other protocols, is for temperature sensors where you don't need insane range. Using BLE broadcasts, anything with Bluetooth LE in range can listen to the broadcasts. Ruuvi sensors are really nice, they broadcast temperature, humidity, pressure and acceleration every 2s for around 3 years on one battery. They are also fully open source hardware, firmware, apps and even the optional gateway and cloud :). Xiaomi "ATC_MiThermometer" with custom firmware is also really nice, they broadcast temperature and humidity and are extremely cheap and has an LCD.

I use BLE temp/hum sensors in my refrigerators and freezers. I'm also going to replace the ESP32 humidity sensor I made for my cigar humidor with a BLE device and see how that works.

I‘m guessing the next video is Thread and last one Matter, based on the icon-rotation in the thumbnail. :-)

I'm trying to find a way to add my Tuya bluetooth meat thermometer to Home Assistant. I already tried a ESP32 bluetooth proxy, a bluetooth USB dongle, which is discovered, installing passive BLE monitor and what not. I know the devices MAC-adress, but honestly, I am at a loss. Is this even possible?

If you have the option of a smart lock using z-wave, zigbee or bluetooth...is it simpler/more secure/more reliable to have the lock activated by detection of your bluetooth signal or by some kind of integration?

Thanks.

It would be really cool to have a QUANTIFIED comparison of the energy requirements of BLE vs ZigBee!

I use SPP it smashes BLE and WIFI on range and speed you can connect up to 50 devices to say 1 phone or pc or multiple phones or PCs at the same time also smashes mesh network by far.

I tend to avoid Bluetooth unless there is no alternative e.g. SwitchBot Bot and Curtains, of which I really wish they would release a Zigbee version of both, as it is very laggy by comparison and can sometimes miss a command altogether. As others have said, Bluetooth for a temperature sensor is not such a problem. I'd still take a Zigbee version over Bluetooth where possible though.

Com on man to a video on Howe to automate espresences ?

Is there going to be one on RF?

Wait, so the server is the "master" and the server is the "end device?" That's so counter intuituve!

I can't ring the UKposts bell. You seem to have notifications disabled.

I miss the old videos, the ones Smart home enthusiasts care about