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.
When I click “save” in the app settings, the app crashes unless I have track_ios: false. How exactly do you have your customize.yaml set? Here’s what I have (which gives me a crash):
zone.home:
track_ios: true
beacon:
uuid: 74278bda-b6444520-8f0c720e-af059935
major: 1
minor: 1080
if I set track_is: false won’t that disable the tracking of all iOS devices for both beacons AND gps?
For anyone following… A reddit user had me check out the format of the UUID:
jwelter, What is the “iTunes wakeup method”?
Hello guys.
I’m interested in buying Happy Bubbles in case it is somehow compatible with the BT trackers I own already from Chipolo (https://eu.chipolo.net/products). Has anyone given it a try? @happybubbles, do you by chance know?
Generally speaking, can the BT trackers be paired with a phone and still be detected by Happy Bubbles?
Thanks in advance for your help.
So it’s true we can’t use multiple beacons unless we set them all the the same UUID, major, and minor with the iOS app? Basically rendering attempting to use the beacons for anything other than a single zone useless?
Correct - it doesn’t take having minor/major both 0 to mean match any like owntracks does,
Just a quick hint for anyone trying to use the Nut 2 beacon with Happy Bubbles. I had some difficulties for it to keep advertising. In pairing mode (long press the button), the Happy Bubbles presence server finds the Nut, but when you complete the pairing process (iOS), or wait 30 seconds, it’s gone. What worked for me is to quit the pairing process halfway. So long press the button, add the Nut with the plus on the iOS app and select it, but don’t go through the rest of the pairing process - just quit the app.