How it works

Open the box.

Two small Linux containers on your Pi, plus a thin proxy on ours. Below is everything that happens between a Bluetooth® packet hitting your antenna and the upstream network receiving it.

The data path.

A BLE device broadcasts. Your gateway hears it, along with whatever other gateways are in range. Whichever gateway forwards the packet first earns the discovery bounty. Four hops, three machines, none of them ours except the middle one.

1

BLE device

A tag, an asset tracker, an industrial sensor. The firmware broadcasts an encrypted packet over standard Bluetooth Low Energy.

2

Your gateway

The worker container scans the radio every few seconds, captures any matching packet in range, and POSTs it to us. The ui container is the dashboard you see at port 8080.

3

EE proxy

We check the packet against your EE token, log it for future bounty accounting, and forward it to the right upstream network. The encrypted payload never opens.

4

Upstream network

The network's positioning engine combines your packet with thousands of others from other gateways to fix the device's location.

What runs on your hardware.

worker Scans Bluetooth, queues packets to a local SQLite database, drains the queue to encryptedenergy.com on a one-second poll, and sends a periodic heartbeat so your dashboard says "Active". Runs on the host network because Bluetooth radios live there. No public port.
ui The setup wizard and dashboard at localhost:8080. Reads the worker's status file. Never touches Bluetooth, never makes outbound calls. Pure local read-only dashboard.

What runs on our hardware.

A small Rails service at encryptedenergy.com/api/v1/gateways/*. It checks incoming packets against your EE token, logs activity for your dashboard, attributes each forwarded packet to your gateway for future bounty accounting, and forwards to the right upstream network using our wholesale relationship there. We don't decrypt the packet payload, ever. We can't: the encryption key belongs to the device's owner, not to us.

What we see, and what we don't.

Two questions operators ask. Both deserve straight answers.

The BLE packet payload. Encrypted by the device firmware before it goes on the air. EE forwards the bytes; only the upstream network holds the decryption key. We never have it and can't read what's inside.
The broadcast identifier. Also encrypted. The device rotates a short identifier every few hours under a key only the upstream network holds. We see the rotating string. We can't map it back to a physical device.
What EE does receive in the clear. Location (lat/lon from your wizard, or live GPS for mobile gateways), signal strength at your antenna (RSSI), and a timestamp. The worker adds these on your end before forwarding; nothing's decoded from the device.
What EE sees of your home network. The outbound HTTPS calls your worker makes to us. That's it: source IP, timestamp, the packet payload above. We can't see your other devices, your other traffic, or anything else on your LAN. The gateway opens no inbound port.

What you need.

A Pi running Umbrel. Pi 5 recommended. Pi 4 works. The same Umbrel that's hosting your Bitcoin and Lightning node is perfect. The gateway uses about 3 watts idle. Multi-arch images mean an x86 mini-PC running Umbrel works too; the BLE radio just has to be reachable through BlueZ.
Outbound HTTPS. The worker makes outbound calls to encryptedenergy.com. That's the only network requirement. No port forwarding, no public IP, no static address.
A location for the gateway. The default is a fixed lat/lon you enter once in the setup wizard. The worker stamps every forwarded packet with that coordinate. For gateways that move (vehicle-mounted, mobile asset), plug in a USB GPS dongle and the worker auto-discovers it; see the kit page for specific dongles and the indoor-lock caveat.

What you don't need.

  • · An account with the upstream network. We hold the wholesale relationship.
  • · Port forwarding or a public IP. All traffic's outbound HTTPS.
  • · A static address. Your gateway's identified by its EE token, not its IP.
  • · Payment. Free at signup, free forever (see payouts).
  • · A lawyer. The whole thing's GPL-3.0; read every line if you want.

Security, briefly.

Your Pi exposes no public port. The dashboard sits behind Umbrel's reverse proxy and is reachable only on your LAN. Tokens are per-gateway and revocable in one click from your account. If a Pi walks off, revoke its token and the gateway's dead to us within one heartbeat cycle. The entire source for both containers is GPL-3.0 at github.com/Encrypted-Energy/gateway.

Ten minutes from here to forwarding.

Start your gateway → Install on Umbrel Payouts