Voice control isn’t mission-critical in my house, but when it breaks, you’d think my coffee maker was plotting against me. My smart home consists of two primary systems - Home Assistant and Google. I configured them to work together through Google Cloud Platform, and everything worked great… until it didn’t a few months ago. Because of dad life (and because duct tape only goes so far in the digital world), time and the fix had slipped away from me.

I know I haven’t introduced my home lab or smart home setup yet. But I recently bought a few new sensors and wanted to share some new theengs I set up.

See what I did there? 😉

Yes, I installed Theengs Gateway on a Raspberry Pi 4B so that it would act as a gateway between my bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensors and my smart home’s MQTT Broker. MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol which is often used in IoT and smart home integrations. It does this via OpenMQTTGateway, and Theengs is like a wrapper around it so that it is easily stood up on a Raspberry Pi or other devices.