ble_monitor is a Python custom component for Home Assistant that passively reads data from a wide range of inexpensive Bluetooth Low Energy sensors so their readings appear in your Home Assistant dashboard.

What it is

BLE monitor is a custom component for Home Assistant, distributed as a Community Home Assistant Store (HACS) installable repository, that listens passively to Bluetooth Low Energy advertisements and turns them into entities inside Home Assistant. It covers dozens of brands — including Xiaomi MiBeacon and MiScale sensors, Qingping, ATC custom firmware, Govee, Inkbird, Ruuvitag, Kegtron, Thermobeacon, SensorPush, Switchbot, b-parasite, BTHome devices, Oral-B, Tilt, and scales from Senssun and Xiaogui — and it can also act as a device tracker for BLE devices identified by a static MAC address or a UUID.

The concrete problem it solves is that most battery-powered BLE sensors only broadcast their readings and never accept a connection, so a normal Bluetooth integration that connects to devices never sees them. BLE monitor performs passive scanning instead, parses each brand's advertisement format, and exposes temperature, humidity, pressure, weight, keg volume, and similar measurements as Home Assistant sensors without requiring a gateway device per brand.

Key capabilities

• Passively parses advertisement packets from more than forty named brands and protocols, including MiBeacon, ATC, BTHome, Govee, Inkbird, Kegtron, Ruuvitag, Thermobeacon, SensorPush, and Tilt.
• Works as a BLE device tracker for devices addressed by static MAC address or by UUID.
• Accepts forwarded data parsed from other sources, as described in the project's "Forward data from ESPhome" documentation page.
• Supports DIY sensors built on the BTHome format, with a dedicated DIY sensors documentation page.
• Provides per-configuration-parameter settings documented under configuration_params, including an active scan option needed to run alongside Home Assistant's core Bluetooth integrations.
• Ships developer documentation and a sensor request page so additional devices and parsing code can be contributed.
• Ships a set of logos and sensor images in the repository under pictures/, such as pictures/sensors.jpg and pictures/sensors_2.png.

Who uses it and how

• Home Assistant users with mixed-brand passive sensors who want a single integration to surface them all, as discussed on the linked Home Assistant community forum thread.
• Users of ATC or BTHome custom firmware on Xiaomi and Qingping hardware who want the flashed readings parsed into Home Assistant.
• Keggers and brewery hobbyists reading Kegtron keg-volume sensors, and homebrewers reading Tilt hydrometers, through Home Assistant.
• People tracking BLE devices with fixed MAC addresses or UUIDs rather than sensor values.
• Contributors migrating sensors from BLE monitor into Home Assistant core integrations, working alongside Home Assistant developers.

Getting started

Install it as a custom component through HACS on a Home Assistant instance (the topics include hacs, hassio, and custom-component), following the Installation instructions page on the project's documentation site.

How it compares

BLE monitor sits alongside Home Assistant's own core Bluetooth integrations, which since Home Assistant 2022.8 have grown native passive BLE support and now cover many of the same brands — BlueMaestro, Govee, Inkbird, Kegtron, Qingping, RuuviTag, SensorPush, Thermobeacon, Tilt, Xiaomi, and others are listed as available as official Home Assistant integrations. It also differs from ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy, which explicitly cannot forward data to BLE monitor, so the two are alternatives rather than complements.

When to use it — and when not to

You must operate a Bluetooth adapter reachable by your Home Assistant host, and be prepared to coexist carefully with core BLE integrations: the README warns they may not run well in parallel (core integrations can stop updating) unless you enable active scan in BLE Monitor. Note that the project's own announcement states BLE monitor will probably be deprecated once its sensors have moved into Home Assistant core, with 119 open issues at the time of listing, so new setups are better served by the core integrations where a brand is covered, and BLE monitor is best suited to sensors not yet migrated.