Anyone with a Valve Index setup knows the sound of two base stations spinning in an empty room. Home Assistant 2026.11 gets a SteamVR Base Station integration that controls them over Bluetooth Low Energy. The first version, by g4bri3lDev, was merged into the development branch on 19 October 2026, and four more changes followed by 24 October: an identify button, power mode and channel selects, a fault sensor and diagnostics.

What is supported

Only SteamVR Base Station 2.0, the kind sold with the Valve Index, works. The 1.0 stations from the original HTC Vive are not supported, because the author does not own any and could not check them. The integration needs a Bluetooth adapter or an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy that supports active connections. Stations in range are discovered on their own, and each shows up under the LHB-... name printed on its back.

The entities

  • Switch: on wakes the station, off puts it to sleep, which stops the motors and lasers.
  • Power mode select: On, Standby or Sleep. According to the documentation a station is back on in about a second from standby and in about 11 seconds from sleep. Standby is hidden on firmware that lacks it.
  • Channel select: the tracking channel, 1 to 16. It is disabled by default, since SteamVR normally assigns channels itself, and is only meant for fixing a conflict.
  • Problem binary sensor: on when the station reports a fault.
  • Identify button: blinks the status LED for 20 seconds, handy when several stations look the same.

The stations broadcast their power state and channel, so Home Assistant updates the entities without polling. The fault reading also arrives in those broadcasts. A connection is opened only briefly to read device information and to send a command.

What you can do with it

The documentation includes an automation that puts the stations to sleep at 01:00 in case you forgot. An open documentation change adds more ideas: sleep when nobody is home, and wake the stations when the gaming PC turns on, so they are tracking by the time the headset goes on. Given the 11-second wake from sleep, standby may be the better choice for a quick start.

Each command needs a free connection slot on the adapter or proxy. If setup or a command fails with a connection error, the documentation says to make sure the station is in range of an adapter or proxy with a free slot.