BLE device discovery disconnects from device

[risoy]

I have an issue with listing the services a BLE device publishes in Developer Tools.

1. I click Discover Devices, and select my device MAC.
2. I click Connect, and it occasionally works to connect for some short time.
3. I click Discover Services, the Services shows, but I am quickly disconnected and the list of services disappears.

It seems I am only able to connect for about 5 seconds until I am disconnected. Way too short for me to read and understand the information.

My BLE device: Minew S1 Temperature and Humidity Device.

In general, it also seems to be an issue just listing the discovered devices. The whole list may be purged after some time, just showing “No advertisements”. A click on Discover Devices will again populate the list for some time.

[Adrian_Rockall]

If you look in the system section, do you have a honey3d or homey4d?
My homey4d is really bad with BLE and shows similar issues.

[risoy]

It says homey4d. It’s really annoying if it is a problem with the Homey.

Do you have any BLE devices working with Homey at all?

[Adrian_Rockall]

I have BLE devices working on my homey3d but nothing really works on the homey4d. I reported it to Athom months ago and they are aware of the issues BLE - Connection problem · Issue #245 · athombv/homey-apps-sdk-issues · GitHub

[risoy]

Thanks. I commented on the GitHub issue. Doesn’t seem to be much progress on it though. Annoying.

[JohanN]

I am also struggling with the BLE on Homey (EcoControl app), timeouts and errors.

Sent a message to Homey support with a diagnostic report and this is the respond I got from them:

From what I can see in the diagnostics report, the BLE seems to be working correctly on Homey.
The best way to solve your issue is to contact the developer of the app (Taelek: info@taelek.fi) and tell them about the issue you are experiencing. They can tell you more specific why your devices loose the connection frequently and how to solve this issue.

While the developer of EcoControl are saying its problem with the Homey BLE issue. And now I am stuck with five BLE thermostat at home that does not work with Homey

Have also homey4d.

[Adrian_Rockall]

I would say it is most likely to be a problem with the Homey BLE as homey4d does not have a good track record.
I can run the same apps on my homey3d and they work fine but fail most of the time on my homey4d.
Also, the Homey Developer Tools would be unreliable on my homey4d.

Note: having said that, I have just check again and with the latest firmware (8.0.8) things do look better, so maybe it has been fixed.

[JohanN]

Tested the latest firmware (8.0.8) and still have the same issue I don’t think it ever will be fixed, since they have been avoiding the git issue ticket lately.

I also see that the Pljed users are struggling too: My Homey Pro doesn´t work with Plejd · Issue #37 · emilohman/homey-plejd · GitHub

I ordered the new Homey pro, so hopefully the bluetooth works there Adrian_Rockall do have Homey Bridge, if so does it work better with it?

[Adrian_Rockall]

@JohanN

I ordered the new Homey pro, so hopefully the bluetooth works there Adrian_Rockall do have Homey Bridge, if so does it work better with it?

No, Homey Bridge is the same as my Homey4d. But the Bridge has the same BLE as that and the new Homey 2023 has an upgraded BLE chip as far as I know.

[robertklep]

@Adrian_Rockall

No, Homey Bridge is the same as my Homey4d. But the Bridge has the same BLE as that

I don’t think so, the Bridge uses the ESP32’s BLE radio while the Pro uses the BLE implementation on the SoC.

[Adrian_Rockall]

@robertklep

I don’t think so, the Bridge uses the ESP32’s BLE radio

That’s interesting as it is just as bad as my homey4d. My homey3d works perfectly OK on the same firmware so I assumed it was hardware related.

[robertklep]

The ESP32 only has one 2.4Ghz RF module which are used both for WiFi and BLE, and getting them to work concurrently is quite a challenge (and depending on the type of ESP32 used, downright difficult to get right).

Homey Pro has (AFAIK) a TI WiLink8 WiFi/BLE module, which is a completely different beast. Earlier models had a Broadcom WiFi/BLE module, but I have no idea when it was changed to the TI part.

Why your homey4d has BLE issues is anyone’s guess, but they could still be hardware-related (bad antenna design, more susceptibility for interference, etc).

[Adrian_Rockall]

I must be lucky as I use an ESP32 for a BLE hub to talk to Homey over WiFi and it works very well. Homey is notified of changes from the BLE devices within a second or two of the device operating. The ESP32 is listening for broadcasts from BLE devices and if it is a device registered by Homey the date is pushed out.

[robertklep]

Yeah, most of the challenging parts are hidden nowadays, especially if you use platforms like Arduino or ESPhome I also use an ESP32 as a BLE proxy for Home Assistant (using ESPhome), which works great.

But Homey Bridge poses some additional challenges, like having other radios (Zigbee/Z-Wave/RF/IR) that have to be managed and also a (what I assume is a permanent) connection to Homey Cloud. To me it seems the Bridge is mildly underpowered.

[Charles]

Got Homey Pro 2023 and still have this issue, anyone knows how to increase this 5s delay ?

I used this from my previous homey changing values

Bluetooth Thermometer Hygrometer from Xiaomi

Awesome does works but CGG1 with ATC are quite long to detect, I needed to install them 3/4 times before seeing it as we can’t set polling_interval and scan_duration into this app (we can with ruuvi app) so default are 60s and 10s scan I have better results with 90s 30s, because 10s we miss often frame let polling_interval = this.homey.settings.get('polling_interval'); let scan_duration = this.homey.settings.get('scan_duration'); //default value for polling and scan …

but can’t anymore since now homey install fire me an error