Raspberry pi zero w with dongle stops reporting / all stop reporting

I am trying for a couple of weeks now to get room presence working. I bought 4 raspberry pi zero w with extra Bluetooth dongles. Presence has been more than sketchy. The following things constantly happen.

Home Assistant reports either my BLE iphone as away or unavailable My Apple Watch through Bluetooth Classic the same.

In my Room assistant companion app they are reported correctly. So why is this information not passed on to Home Assistant. It seems after a reboot that they work for a couple of minutes (maybe 10) and then both entities are reporting wrong again (not in the app, but in Home Assistant).

I am kindof at a loss what to do. I have replaced one zero with a raspberry pi 3 b+, and am thinking of replacing all the zero’s with 3 or 4 pi’s. But I am not sure even pi 3 accurately reports the status.

This is my config file:

cluster:
  port: 6415
  peerAddresses:
    - 192.168.10.75:6415
    - 192.168.10.77:6415
    - 192.168.10.79:6415
    - 192.168.10.80:6415
    - 192.168.10.81:6415
  autoDiscovery: true
  weight: 30
global:
  instanceName: bedroom
  integrations:
    - homeAssistant
    - bluetoothLowEnergy
    - bluetoothClassic
homeAssistant:
  mqttUrl: 'mqtt://mqttaddress:1883'
  mqttOptions:
    username: loginname
    password: password
bluetoothLowEnergy:
  hciDeviceId: 0
  allowlist:
    - 1E808694-68E0-433E-A010-BC850C8481F0
    - 4A89AB27-F043-4A8F-B357-5FA63302DC36
  maxDistance: 5
  tagOverrides:
    1E808694-68E0-433E-A010-BC850C8481F0:
      name: Iphone Jeroen BLE
    4A89AB27-F043-4A8F-B357-5FA63302DC36:
      name: Iphone Isaac BLE
bluetoothClassic:
  hciDeviceId: 1
  minRssi: -5
  addresses:
    - '64:d2:c4:7a:72:c2'
  entityOverrides:
    '64:d2:c4:7a:72:c2':
      name: Apple Watch Jeroen BT

On 2 of the raspberry pi zero’s I constantly get this error when running room-assistant in verbal mode:

BluetoothService: Command failed: hcitool -i hci1 cc "64:d2:c4:7a:72:c2" && hcitool -i hci1 rssi "64:d2:c4:7a:72:c2"
Can't create connection: Input/output error
Get connection info failed: No such file or directory

Connection to MQTT broker is fine. New instances are reported to Home Assistant, just their status not.

[JeroenTuinstra]

@Chaphasilor What made it work for me was to add an extra BT dongle to the raspberry pi. The extra dongle is recognized and configured automatically to hci0. It hasn’t stopped working for 2 weeks now. Before, just using the internal BT, made it crash very often, with the extra dongle, no more. For BT Low Energy that didn’t work for me. Tried to assign low energy to the dongle and classic to internal, but it didn’t help.

[JeroenTuinstra]

@PeteBa I guess we can discuss the definition of “background”, but really the task switcher on the iphone switches between open apps, not background apps. For example the mail app doesn’t have to be open in order to receive and notify you of new emails. Almost no app needs to remain open (or in the task switcher) in order to update. This app would be great if it could properly work in the background and not rely on you keeping it in the task switcher. But indeed when you keep the app in the task switcher it updates continuously, so that works. If the app is ever rewritten to work really in the background, then I will give BLE with the iphone another shot. Till then, Classic is I guess the way.

Thanks by the way @PeteBa, you’re the only one responding to issues. Haven’t seen or heard anything from @mKeRix on this forum or in discussions. Even though great work has been done, thanks @mKeRix.