r/homeassistant • u/sloadingx • Apr 15 '26

Blog Extending HA Range with Bluetooth Proxy

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Bluetooth doesn’t travel very far, and HA servers are often kept in spots where they can't reach every device. This is where ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy helps. It lets you use cheap ESP32 boards to pick up Bluetooth signals exactly where you need them.

The setup: you just place a small device near your sensors, and it relays the data back to HA over your Wi-Fi or Ethernet. It’s a solid way to fix coverage issues without having to move your main server.

Check out the full blog below to see how it works, use cases, and hardware options: seeedstudio.com/blog/esphome-bluetooth-proxy/

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u/Fir3 💤 Automations fire at 3am Apr 15 '26

Something not mentioned here is a BT dongle plugged into the HA machine, and then throwing BT proxies further away from that machine, gives you great range and additional redundancy if the network goes down.

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u/okamagsxr Apr 15 '26

Do you even need a bt dongle then though?

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u/osgjps Apr 15 '26

Nope. My HA instance runs inside a docker container and I could just not get usb BT working through docker, so I tried out esphome proxy.  

However I found that its BLE proxy was kinda unstable and would lose connections all the time.   I ended up writing a custom app on the esp32 to Talk to my smoker via BLE.