laurentpointca/bluetti-ac200l-autorestart

This project fixes an annoying gap in the Bluetti AC200L, a portable battery power station some people use as a home UPS, a backup power source that keeps things running during an outage. If the grid power fails for long enough to fully drain the AC200L to zero percent, the unit shuts down. When power returns, it wakes up and starts recharging on its own, but it does not turn its AC output back on, so anything plugged into it, like home internet equipment, stays without power until someone manually flips the output back on. Bluetti has chosen not to add an auto-restart feature for safety reasons, even though other models of theirs support it. The fix here is a small, always-on controller, built to run on a cheap ESP32 microcontroller, that watches the AC200L over Bluetooth Low Energy and automatically re-enables the AC output once it detects that grid power is back and it is safe to do so. It determines safety by checking whether the unit is actively drawing input power or whether its battery charge is above a certain threshold, since either condition rules out a genuine ongoing power outage. The controller runs entirely over a direct Bluetooth connection to the unit, with no dependence on the internet, a cloud service, or a home network, which matters because the AC200L itself is what powers the network equipment. The repository provides three ways to run this: firmware for the recommended ESP32 controller, an alternative Python program meant to run as a background service on a Raspberry Pi, and a set of proof-of-concept scripts used to test and confirm the communication protocol on a Mac. The underlying Bluetooth communication protocol was reverse engineered by community members from other related open-source projects, not created from scratch here, and the author credits that prior work. According to the README, both reading device status and writing the restart command have been proven to work on real hardware, with the main remaining task being to flash the firmware onto a physical ESP32 board and deploy it. The project is released under the MIT license.