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.
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)
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 , 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 . Thanks!
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 . I did not erase the flash memory beforehand, so the MQTT settings etc. remained as they were.
, 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’.
. Thanks!