Espruino MQTT Hub - Repeater Mode? Extend BT Range?

I'm using the Espruino Hub to (Puck <--> MQTT) and Node-Red quite nicely.

The problem I am having is that the Pi-Zero-W (or the puck itself) goes out of range pretty quickly.

Has anyone thought about a type of repeater hub that can repeat BT messages across the network as MQTT but some how deduplicate if the same messsage is received on both the hub and repeater?

My Mom is using it as an alert device so that we children can get a SMS whenever she presses the button. It works really well except when she is farther away from the pi-z-hub.

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

It is the "Present" flag that concerns me. What if she falls in the far area of the kitchen where I know there is a dead spot. No horrible pun intended :)

I should move the RSSI under the Presence so make them easy to compare.

FYI - to determine if both the system and my Mom are OK, I look at things like

1. Temperature of the puck (higher when she is wearing it as opposed to lying on the counter top)
   
2. Motion, obviously
   
3. RSSI changes as she is in one room versus the other
   
4. Presence, obviously
   

There's not a great deal I can suggest...

You could use an external bluetooth dongle that has greater range - for example https://shop.espruino.com/usb-bluetooth

There were some thoughts about making EspruinoHub work with multiple hubs, so presence got tweaked depending on whether a device could be see by any of the hubs. I guess you could still do this with manually node-red - you'd just have to handle looking at both 'presence' variables.

Thanks, I'll look into the process for using a dongle BT receiver on the Pi-Z-W.

Adding that would probably be the quickest and most effective solution in my specific case. Doing a mesh type model might be a good theoretical exercise for me to learn more but to get running quickly the antenna is probably easiest.

I think I am right on the edge. When I tried the same system model using a Pi-4 (more capacity than needed for this simple scenario) it seemed to perform a bit better. Maybe the Pi-4 internal antenna is just different enough from the Pi-Z to give me that little extra margin I needed.

Then again, a Pi-z with antenna might be equal in price to a Pi-4. Hmmm. I'll test with the 4 again to see how often that one is out of range.

Worth adding that WiFi uses the same aerial so will interfere with BLE reception when active. Using a Pi 3 or 4 allows you to use ethernet which means WiFi won't be causing you issues.