Many devices created

[Fiveol]

PadSpan HA version

v0.19.91

Home Assistant version

2026.4.2

BLE scanner type

None

Description

Devices with rotating MAC addresses have many devices created for them.

Many devices are blank, some have the real entities, some have fake entities. Many entities are created, too, causing automations to fail.

Steps to reproduce

Use Padspan for a while with a device with rotating MAC addresses.

Expected behavior

One device created for each tracker in PadSpan

Logs

Screenshots

No response

[gbroeckling]

Yeah this is a known limitation with rotating MAC devices that don't have an IRK configured. Without the IRK, PadSpan
has no way to know that MAC_A and MAC_B are the same physical device — they look like completely different BLE
broadcasts.

When PadSpan does have the IRK (which you get from your phone's BLE identity key), it resolves all the rotating MACs
to one stable identity and everything merges into a single device + entity set. That's the private_ble path
internally, and it's solid.

Without IRK, the same-label dedup tries to catch duplicates by merging objects with the same tag name, but the
underlying MAC keeps changing, so HA ends up creating new entities for each one. The stale ones go unavailable but
never get cleaned up automatically.

Short term — if you configure IRKs for your tracked phones, the duplication stops completely. You can clean up the
orphaned entities in Settings → Devices → search for the blank/duplicate PadSpan entries and delete them.

I just shipped a fix in v0.20.55 that adds a label-based dedup guard to entity creation. Even if the MAC rotates and
the internal key changes, PadSpan now checks whether it already created entities for that label and skips the
duplicate. So that should stop the bleeding going forward.

Let me know how it looks

[Fiveol]

Thank you for fixing this! I had the IRK on those devices already. Now no devices are created, started one week ago.