bluetooth-proxies VS espup

If you're already using Home Assistant, you can install ESPHome on any ESP32-based device and use it as a Bluetooth Proxy hub. I already had some smartplugs and bulbs flashed with ESPHome, so it was as simple as adding a couple more lines of code to get a few BLE Proxy hubs, with no additional hardware required for the hub.

Home Assistant and Bluetooth Proxy is probably your best bet: https://esphome.github.io/bluetooth-proxies/

where can I find the yaml configuration file? I flashed the esp32 directly with the bluetooth proxy wizard, hence I never touched the yaml file myself. Is it stored somewhere in HA?

Yep, these are the way to go. Small and with a case, so ready to put around the house.

Using just your browser you can transform these into Bluetooth proxies for Home Assistant with https://esphome.github.io/bluetooth-proxies/

I think the sequence when using the web installer from here is that it first installed a basic EXPHome WiFi connector and once done, supposed to autmomagically install the BT Proxy software but it fails. It gives you the chance to rename it to something more appropriate but then you get some other 'web' ESP device pop up?

ESPHome uses a yaml file as input from which to generate the binary firmware file for your ESP. Flashing via their github as you did means it will use one of these predefined yaml files. Because you chose generic esp, it will be using this one. As you can see it already has the api: line in there (line 21).

with framework set to esp-idf (as per https://github.com/esphome/bluetooth-proxies/blob/main/gl-s10.yaml), the device logs stop at "Starting scheduler on APP CPU"

https://github.com/esp-rs/espup/issues/19 https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/1355

Thanks for mentioning it. I already tried using it a few months ago and brushed it off as still being a WIP, but it still didn't work when I tried again just a few days ago. Asking in the Matrix chat when first trying it sadly only got me a "works for me" from the developers.

What Espressif is doing with their esp-idf and porting it to Rust is promising, but overall it still needs work. Using the toolchain to develop on the ESP32 was at least slightly painful half a year ago before they introduced espup[1], having to keep a patched LLVM around etc., and supposedly support for their Xtensa architecture is coming to LLVM soon[2] so this will improve in the future.

I'd also love to see Bluetooth support in esp-idf-svc[3], but they seem to be lacking people with the required knowledge to design and implement an abstraction for it[4].

[1]: https://github.com/esp-rs/espup

The environment setup can now be done with espup, its a Rust tool that replaces the bash scripts and also works in Windows.

Installing it locally should be relatively simple with espup, let me know if you finally decide to go for this option and have some questions!

We even have our own installer (written in Rust of course :D) - https://github.com/esp-rs/espup