LILYGO T-Internet-POE with OpenMQTTGateway?

First post here and I’m unfamiliar with OpenMQTTGateway in general, so apologies in advance if I’m asking obvious questions…

Towards the end of last year, I purchased a LILYGO T-Internet-POE device to flash with ESPHome and add to my Home Assistant setup as a bluetooth proxy. I like the fact it can do power and comms over a single cable, which is one of the main reasons I purchased it.

It is working well in the sense that I see lots of Bluetooth devices in the “Bermuda BLE Trilateration” integration within Home Assistant, but that’s where it ends, as it appears I can’t do anything useful with it.

I then stumbled across OpenMQTTGateway, which should allow me to pick up my BM2 car battery monitor data for example. Question is, can I flash OpenMQTTGateway onto the LILYGO T-Internet-POE device? If so, would that be one of the pre-compiled libraries and would it allow me to continue to use the device in POE mode? I found this post but it isn’t clear to me whether @Oekel managed to get the device up and running or not.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I did not test OpenMQTTGateway until now.

But in general PoE is nothing regardings Software. Its allway there when Hardware support it and plugged in. (In my case T-Internt-POE is broken 3 times at this PoE Management-Chip. So I am looking forward to other hardware → still use them with USB-Powered, but without PoE other boards are better and cheaper)

Please tell me when you figured out how OpenMQTTGateway is better than EspHome or Tasmota (I use a lot)

Hello,

We don’t have an environment for this board but you can still use a regular esp32dev-ble with WiFi even if the power comes from PoE

OK, thanks @1technophile, I will give that a go and let you know how I get on.

I managed to flash the regular “esp32dev-ble” onto the board using esptool, and using MQTT Explorer I can see that Bluetooth devices are being detected. I believe I have auto discovery enabled (not knowingly disabled anyway), so from what I understand, when a compatible device is detected, such as my BM2 battery monitor for example, it should automatically appear in the devices section? Thanks.

Success :smiley:, my BM2 and BM6 battery monitors have appeared as MQTT devices. No voltage data for the BM6, but from other posts I understand that this is a known ‘issue’.

As a next step, I’d like to utilise the ethernet port for the network traffic (disable Wi-Fi), so that the wireless part is used for Bluetooth only. Can you see any issue with me trying the “esp32-olimex-gtw-ble-poe” firmware on my device? Hardware-wise the devices appear very similar, although I’m sure the devil will be in the detail :wink:. Thanks!

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Just to answer my own question, I flashed the “esp32-olimex-gtw-ble-poe” firmware onto my LILYGO T-Internet-POE device and it is working as expected, i.e. it’s now using the LAN connection for comms and POE :smiley:. I did not erase the flash memory beforehand, so the MQTT settings etc. remained as they were.

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