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Using Minew MG6 4G BLE Gateway for OGS

Using the Minew MG6 4G Bluetooth Stellar Gateway for OGS (e.g. to connect the Shelly BLU Button or other BTHome devices) has a lot of advantages compared to directly connected bluetooth low energy hardware:

  • Deploy multiple Gateways to cover larger areas
  • Compared to BLED112 (BlueGiga) USB dongles, no additional hardware needs to be attached to the PC running OGS (especially, if you are running OGS on tablet hardware)
  • Compared to using builtin BLE hardware with the Windows BLE stack, it is much more reliable and not dependent on manufacturers Windows driver support.

Prerequisites

The Minew MG6 4G Bluetooth Stellar Gateway works by sending BLE data to a MQTT broker. Therefore an MQTT broker must be installed somewhere in the network. All Gateway devices and all OGS stations will connect to this central server.

A commonly used MQTT broker is Eclipse Mosquitto, which is available for all major operating systems.

Wifi/LAN and MQTT configuration

After a factory reset, the Minew MG6 gateway device creates an open soft access point using the integrated wifi interface. For the initial configuration, connect to this AP (SSID name is GW-xxxxxxxxxxxx) and open a webbrowser at the default http://192.168.99.1 address. Log on as admin with a blank password.

The main page will show the current configuration - adjust the network settings (on the network tab) as needed for your environment:

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Configure MQTT output

Configuring the MQTT output is son in the Bluetooth menu in the Generic and MQTT pages.

The Generic page defines the main parameters, such as the protocol type (set to MQTT), the timing and the data format (make sure to select the JSON-RAW format). For a working configuration, see the following screenshot:

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The MQTT page defines where to send the data - here you configure the MQTT broker address and connection parameters as well as the topic, where BLE advertisments are published. See the following screenshot for a working configuration:

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Configure BLE parameters

By default, the Gateway is preconfigured for the Minew devices and protocols. To use it with BTHome type devices (like the Shally BLU button), a few adjustments must be made to the default configuration. Also a filter should be set, so only the BTHome advertisments are received (to minimize network overhead).

The tabs Filter and Scan allow setting the relevant parameters.

The Filter page must use the regular expresson ^.*d2fc.* to filter the raw advertisment data for the BTHome device class. Also duplicate events should be discarded - here is a working configuration:

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Finally, the Scan page defines the type of BLE scan the device is using - for BTHome, only passive scans are needed. Here is a working configuration:

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OGS configuration

tbd.