What is the general opinion on Ruuvi? At least they are fairly open source friendly, but idk if they are actually good? Have been considering getting them...
The Ruuvi is a complete beast. It'll last for years on a single coin battery. I got them from the initial Kickstarter and replaced batteries last year.
You _can_ read them with just a cell phone or hack a Raspberry Pi as a BLE listener, and It'll work just fine most of the time. Even ESP32 has a system for reading the tags with esphome I think.
The antenna on that thing is completely ridiculous. My Raspberry Pi had to hang from the ceiling to get even 10% of the readings from my sauna (lined with foil to keep the heat and moisture in as per Finnish building code).
I got a the Gateway, quickly powered it up at my desk and boom, it found the sauna tag immediately, zero packet loss.
I've got one in both my fridges and freezer, zero issues. Sauna goes up to 80C normally and is MOIST, no problems. People even float them in pools, just cover the moisture sensor hole with tape and double bag it in ziploc.
You can get similar BT devices from china, but they eat up batteries like candy and the signal strength isn't that good.
There’s apparently a custom HACS integration [0], discussed in their forums [1]. Personally I’d get the cheaper Aqara sensors as I have a Zigbee network anyway, so I see no advantage in BLE. Also, the motion sensor (of the tag, not of other people) seems like a really useless feature.
The motion sensor isn't useless, you just lack imagination :)
You can slap one on your mailbox lid for example and have an alert pop up when the counter changes. It has X/Y/Z acceleration sensors too if you want to know the direction of the motion.
https://ruuvi.com/