7.3.8 - Beacons, disabling the BT interface and tracking non-fixed MAC

Changes in 7.3.8

This release has quite some improvements. I would like to thank @dmamontov, who took care of some of these big changes.

New sensors

• iBeacon protocol (@dmamontov)
• altBeacon protocol (@dmamontov)
• Inkbird iBBQ-1 sensors (@Ernst79)

New features

• track devices based on the Beacon UUID (instead of the MAC address). This allows you to track devices that have a non-fixed, rotating MAC address. (@dmamontov)
• Added the option to disable the Bluetooth interface at all (see explanation at the end of the release notes) (@Ernst79)
• Add support for BLE advertisements with multiple manufacturer specific data packets in one advertisement (@Ernst79)

Bug fixes

• Fix for not being able to change BT adapter after restoring settings on a new machine (#656) (@Ernst79)

New translations

• Swedish (@el97)
• Russian (@dmamontov)
• French (@Hydci)

Disabling the Bluetooth interface
Disabling the BT adapter can be useful when using ESPHome BLE gateway to forward the BLE messages to BLE monitor and you don't want to use Bluetooth adapter from your HA machine.

In the UI, you can select "Don't use Bluetooth adapter" to disable the use of the Bluetooth adapter.

In YAML, you can do this with the following:

ble_monitor:
  bt_interface: "disable"