Please tell me.
HA app use only bluetooth and ibeacon to track iphone? GPS is turn off?
I search solution to track only home/away, gps turned off to save battery.
For home/away best solution will be nmap, i bet that you use wifi at home? If this is the case then you dont need ibeacons or gps
I use Bluetooth Presence on my Pi3, (not BLE), it works great.
I know this is slightly old but I found nmap far too unreliable and hence moved to a couple of iBeacons. Appears to work much much quicker and more reliable for me anyway. I pull up in the car, GPS still catching up, wifi not in range, ibeacon detects our phones automations start before we leave the car. Which is important for me, as if my wife is alone, the outside lights, hallway lights etc come on if is it after a certain time/darkness.
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I bought a few those Nut 2 beacons and unfortunately the advertisement rate is very low. It’s about 2.5s, so it takes quite a long time to detect them properly. When I press the button on them then their are advertising much more frequently.
Do you know how to increase the advertisement rate? Maybe it’s not possible with them. In that case what other beacons would you recommend to get more instant presence detection?
Even my Misfit Shine is advertising with 1s rate, so it’s much more reliable. Nut’s sometimes even longer are not advertising any updates.
Buy some radbeacon USB units and then you can set them to advertise very quickly as not worried about battery drain. I have a couple in my house for the iOS app to see I’m home, as well as one in my car cigarette USB charger so the house knows when my car comes home.
Between those two plus a wifi tracker (using the iTunes wakeup method) on our iOS devices we have presence “nailed” now.
I pull onto driveway and garage light come on, door opens, etc, etc.
I need something that I can carry over home, so it must be running on battery. Three happy bubbles in different rooms and with beacons I can detect position in my home. I just some device that would adverise more frequently.
I want to just use my Pi (with built in bluetooth and HA installed on it) to track a beacon. I have got a little BLE beacon and want to track (presence) with my built-in Bluetooth of the Pi. This is possible without additional hardware…right?
jwelter
Dec '17
Buy some radbeacon USB units and then you can set them to advertise very quickly as not worried about battery drain. I have a couple in my house for the iOS app to see I’m home, as well as one in my car cigarette USB charger so the house knows when my car comes home.
Between those two plus a wifi tracker (using the iTunes wakeup method) on our iOS devices we have presence “nailed” now.
I pull onto driveway and garage light come on, door opens, etc, etc.
do you have your zone.home set to passive?
What do you mean by passive?
Setting zone.home to passive per zone page
passive (Optional): Optional boolean to only use the zone for automation and hide it from the UI and not use the zone for device tracker name. Defaults to false.
I’m almost tempted to use it for Home location although I’m not sure of everything I’ll miss by setting zone to passive, the notes are not always up to date on the doc pages.
I don’t have any indication that my home is being activated by ibeacon although it is broadcasting and customize.yaml is set correctly. GPS works 6/10 times and wifi tracking works once it connects (seems like forever when sitting in the car)
HA shows tracking ‘source type’ GPS but I’m not sure if beacon is a valid source type to display.
iOS app having “enter beacon” typo (still valid in v1.1.1?), I don’t know when iBeacon is working.
I’m tempted to create a small, passive zone.driveway within zone.home radius and hope that my ibeacon activates my automation more reliably but some posts indicate zone overlap doesn’t work.
No I don’t use it.
My iBeacons work great except:
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Have to use the same uuid, major, and minor for all 5 beacons that cover my home. This is because HA and the IOS app, unlike OwnTracks, does not assume that a 0 for the minor or major means “wildcard” and matches any. When I was using OT I had all my beacons using the same uuid, major was 1 for them all, and minor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. In OT I set it to minor = 0 and it would match with any of the beacons. With the iOS app it doesn’t work this way.
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There is a bug in the IOS app where it says zone exited for both enter and exit zone on beacon. Made troubleshooting the above issue a bit odd, until I found this out. Supposedly it will be fixed in the next release.
My one radbeacon usb has major/minor set to 1, I wasn’t sure if that mattered. It’s the only beacon I have.
I can’t tell if the bug in iOS app is only a notification mistype or if it’s functionally broken. I’m not able to figure out why iBeacon takes so long (or never at all) to notice I’m near it for up to a minute or if it’s not working.
Nor am I able to determine how I know iBeacon is the one initiating the automation trigger.
I may open another thread about this, this is bordering on hijacking the thread
I looked at the iOS code and it is a bug in the notification only. The functionality is right but for both enter and exit of a zone it says exit.
How do you know (or have something indicate) that the iBeacon specifically was used to enter instead of GPS?
How do you know it’s working or not?
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Is anyone else having trouble getting their Happy Bubbles beacon status to update in HA? I recently set up one Happy Bubbles detectors so that HA would know when I’m in my bedroom and when I’m not.
It seems like when the detector sees my beacon, it updates the distance attribute in HA, but when it no longer sees my beacon, the status in HA remains “bedroom” (the name of my detector), even when my beacon has been out of range for hours.
Is anyone else having this issue?
Make sure you don’t have Happy Bubbles configured to “only send changes to HA”
Yeah, I don’t have it configured to “only send location changes to HA” 
So your iBeacon i talking to your iPhone iOS HA app? No need for Bluetooth BLE tracker in ha config ?
Yes the app detects beacons configured inside the zone. The ‘gps accuracy’ value goes to 1 when the beacon is being used. Unfortunately it also uses gps so it uses both which is confusing.
To use beacons with iOS app:
in the 'customise for the zone, set the UUID major and minor.
In the app, go to settings and ‘save’ them again. That will refresh everything and show the beacon info in the zone.