I wanted HomeAssistant to use my Body Mi Scale with Home Assistant, but my server is too far from the scale and can’t detect the bluetooth data.

But I do have a Raspberry running LibreElec (in a beautiful Flirc case) near my bathroom, and I decided to use it as a bluetooth proxy. LibreElec being a « Just Enough OS », I didn’t want to mess with it, as my config should survive version upgrades.
Fortunately, LibreElec supports Docker, and a Docker image exists

Here are my quick notes :

LibreElec

Use a recent version of LibreElec (12.x in my case)

Make sure bluetooth is enable in Kodi / Settings / LibreElec / Services

Make sure the Docker addon for Kodi is installed

SSH in LibreElec as root

Pull the docker image :

# docker pull theengs/gateway

And run it with the following settings :

# docker run --restart always --network host -e MQTT_HOST=mqtt_broker_hostname -e BLE=true -e DISCOVERY=true -e SCANNING_MODE=active -e PUBLISH_ALL=false -e SCAN_TIME=1 -e TIME_BETWEEN=20 -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus --name TheengsGateway theengs/gateway

Each time you use your scale, you should see appear after ~10 secs some data into the home/TheengsGateway/BTtoMQTT topic

Optional : use passive scanning

Because passive scanning is soooo much cool than active (I guess that’s a good enough reason), you can enable it with a few extra steps.

First, enable experimental features in bluez :

# systemctl edit bluetooth.service

and add the following lines :

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd --experimental $BLUEZ_ARGS $BLUEZ_DEBUG

Then restart bluetooth

# systemctl restart bluetooth

And replace the docker command with

# docker run --restart always --network host -e MQTT_HOST=mqtt_broker_hostname -e BLE=true -e DISCOVERY=true -e SCANNING_MODE=passive -e PUBLISH_ALL=false -v /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus --name TheengsGateway theengs/gateway

 

HomeAssistant

If MQTT Integration is installed in Home Assistant, it should discover the scale and its sensors.
You can now install the bodymyscale integration.