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I bought a few of the Switchbot Meter Plus temperature/humidity sensors when they were on sale, to put one in each room and use them to control my heating.

They "broadcast" everything shown on the screen as BLE service-data which means you can passively read it at whatever interval.

I didn't want to sign up to their cloud with the app where they collect all of your data (my HA is offline, that's how it'll stay) so I built a BLE<->WiFi<->MQTT device using an ESP32 and a firmware I found on Github, with some modifications; it scans for the devices by BLE address, reads the service data and publishes it to the MQTT endpoints used for HASS.



FWIW, if your HASS is running on a device (like a Raspberry Pi) that has Bluetooth, you might be able to get away with a custom component like https://github.com/custom-components/ble_monitor instead. Of course, if your setup is working for you already there isn't much incentive to change it.


I run mine on a VM in my server rack

Anyone serious about running HASS, or home automation in general should move away from a Pi because it's not cut out for running a home, the SDs are fragile and need decent, clean power and the performance isn't stellar when you've got a lot going on.

It's a nice, cheap starting point, but something like a NUC or similar is the next step for a reliable machine to run it on and won't suck up electricity.




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