Is anyone in the community aware of an Edge driver for “generic” Bluetooth devices?
I’ve set up Bluetooth beacons in each room of the home (testing a solution for someone) for presence detection (using a Fitbit watch) and would love to connect those to Smartthings if possible. If done it in Home Assistant, but if I could make it a Smartthings solution, that would be cleaner.
(Side note - I’d also like to add a Bluetooth two-probe grill thermometer to the system as well.)
It’s not possible at the present time because SmartThings hubs and the Aeotec hub do not offer Bluetooth for control of home automation devices. Only for some onboarding tasks.
If you have a Samsung Galaxy smart phone you can add some Bluetooth devices to your phone, but they won’t show up in SmartThings routines.
When it comes to using Bluetooth beacons, that’s actually pretty simple but you have to use a second app as a “receiving station“. I do this in my own home with iBeacons.
And of course, any Bluetooth device like Flic or some of the SwitchBot devices which connects to its own hub which is a “matter bridge” can bring some of those devices into SmartThings that way. But it’s up to that third-party matter Bridge to expose the devices to SmartThings.
So you can have Bluetooth devices in a SmartThings set up, but it’s not done with edge drivers and it’s not done by direct Bluetooth communication to a SmartThings hub.
@JDRoberts - Thank you kindly for that quick response - that all makes perfect sense. Let me research what it would take to build my own Bluetooth-Matter bridge for this app.