I think a big step for home automation is knowing the location of the target person where he is inside the house (each room), in order to automate various functions better.
From my understanding the way to go is a receiver/transmitter (better not your cellular, maybe something attached to your keys or similar) that you carry with you, and a transmitter/receiver that gets the signal and sends it to HA for proper use.
Anyone did something similar?
I am experimenting with iBeacons and HappyBubbles before setting it up in our new home being built.
I have detectors set up in different rooms and beacons in my kid’s school bags and in the cars.
I have the server running on a Pi3 sending the status to Hass.
So far the setup seems to be running pretty well and reports the position of the beacons accurately. The Happy bubbles server sorts through the beacons and reports the closest beacon to it to Hass.
I have no idea how to make the kids or my wife to carry the beacons all the time. I have heard somewhere we can embed the beacons in the shoes or something like that.
Anil
How are the HappyBubbles receivers powered? Do they require USB power or do they also have some kind of battery? Do you have any pictures of how you have them set up in your house (location/mounting/etc)? I’m wanting to do something similar in my house.
Cool.
Which item needs to be carried on, and which you put in every room?
The detector is to be set up on each room and will send mqtt messages to a server you specify over wifi.
Every one should carry a beacon around to be identified.
You can buy the beacons from them or from someone else. I have beacons from Avvel.
The receivers are powered by an old mobile charger, at the moment they are sitting on top of my speaker without any case.
I am planning to put it inside the wall behind a face plate at my new place if everything works.
As I said earlier getting everyone to carry the beacon is hard.
As it is I can detect if my sons are back from school.
I guess receivers=detector ??
Is there any company selling both ibeacon and detector? I would rather buy both from the same company, even better as a package to avoid compatibility issues
Happy bubbles sells both detector and the beacons.
I bought the pack of 4 detectors with single free ibeacon for $100. I could not get the beacon they supplied to work with the detector though.
I bought 4 off long range beacons from avvel and are working good.
I also have some beacons from bluki which I was planning to use with bluetooth_le_tracker and are working well with the happy bubble detector.
that’s not encouraging 
It’s not their fault I guess, I had a lot of beacons detected in the server and had trouble identifying all of them. Once the system worked as expected I did not bother identifying the remaining beacons. I can detect the location of the beacons very precisely, If I carry a beacon from living to masterbed, server detects it immediately.
You could also opt for the other way around, Place a few beacons in your home and let your phone be the receiver, it then sends your location to a server.
That way a raspberry pi or almost any other Bluetooth LE device can be the beacon.
It does require everyone to have a smartphone and carry it around, something that might be problem with small children…
Can you explain better how this works?
Which programs to use on the smartphone to make it a detector?
Bluetooth? But in case of multiple beacon (one in bedroom, one in corridor, one in bathroom) will be able to signal correctly the position?
On iOS iBeacon technology is part of the SDK, Example of an app using it: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/particle-detector/id724226138?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D8. The best way would be integrating it in the home assistant ios app. But it wouldn’t be to difficult to build it yourself. https://www.raywenderlich.com/66584/ios7-ibeacons-tutorial
On Android there are apps and possibilities as well.
You give every beacon an id, major (building) and minor (sub location). This can be done on a raspberry pi or an official ibeacon for rpi: https://learn.adafruit.com/pibeacon-ibeacon-with-a-raspberry-pi/overview
iOS detects the bluetooth beacon when you are within 5 meter of the device, and triggers your app to perform an action. Based on the strength of the signal it knows how far you are from the beacon.
I think it’s common here for people to use OwnTracks to receive beacons on their iPhone. I have a few iBeacons in the mail and that’s what I’ll be trying to use.
Didn’t knew OwnTracks did iBeacons as well, that would make it much easier
For anyone already running HomeAssistant on a Raspberry Pi 3 you can turn the RPi3 into an iBeacon that you then associate with GPS coordinates in OwnTracks. It works really well and doesn’t require any additional purchases. I followed this guide: https://andrewmemory.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/turning-a-raspberry-pi-3-into-an-ibeacon/
This is how I attempted it. I bought a few HM-10 sensors off ebay and set them up as ibeacons. I had very limited success in getting HASS to recognise them via owntracks, however. It was very inconsistent - possibly due to my configuration. I also noticed that it was significantly draining the phone’s battery which is why I have given up for the moment and relegated it to the back-burner
Hi everyone, nemik here from Happy Bubbles. I’m sorry for not responding sooner, I just discovered this thread.
First, thank you anilet for your review and I’m happy to hear to you got everything mostly working! I’m sorry though to hear about your beacon not working. I would advise perhaps changing the battery if possible, it’s a CR2025 coin cell.
Also, as a tip, if you have trouble finding which one is the beacon from the presence server’s list of available beacons, take a look at two things: first, the beacons I sell should be identified as iBeacons; second, you can see in which room or which detector is picking them up and also look at their distance or signal strength if you put it close to a detector. That might help narrow things down.
Otherwise if it really doesn’t work, I’d be happy to send you a replacement.
Thanks again for trying out the product and taking a chance on it! It’s still new but I tried hard to make it work well.
Lastly, I’m hoping to make more beacon-like devices that work with Happy Bubbles detectors and would love suggestions from you guys if you have any. The great thing about Bluetooth Low Energy is how little power it uses. One of the things I’ve done was create a little wooden box with a wall light-switch on it for my son. I wrote a custom firmware for a BLE module to only send a beacon when the light-switch changes, which is then picked up by the Happy Bubbles detectors. Right now, it lets him control the Christmas tree in the living room and he likes it a lot. The cool thing is, it’s been running for over a month now on a single coin-cell battery and can be moved around anywhere because it’s so low power and only turns on to send an advertisement when the switch changes.
If you guys are interested in stuff like this, I could cook up another board for these coin-cell-powered beacons that get triggered by buttons or switches or other stuff like that.
A simple button is one of the things I’ve not been able to find. I think that would be great.I was excited by Flic initially but it seems to require a phone running an app to be present. Logitech pop is expensive and not available in my country. Zwave wall switches etc are out as I am a renter and could be told I have to find a new place to live at any time.
I was going to buy a 4 pack a few months ago of your detectors and beacons but got the idea that I again needed an app running to use a phone as a beacon? I’m still not sure if I need to run an app broadcasting a signal. Will a detector pick up a phone or smartwatch if the bluetooth is simply on and the device is known? I’m considering it but not so keen on having to find somewhere to attach beacons.
Presence detection is something I’ve found terribly unreliable in my setup and I’d love to give you my money for something that just works for me!