It’s powered by microUSB, same plug you could use to charge a phone, that’s it.
The range depends on the broadcasting power of the beacons. You can program beacons to broadcast stronger signals, but that reduces battery life. But maximum would be about 100 feet or so, depending if there are walls, how thick, etc.
What happens is that beacons are always sending out signals. When the detector reads one of those, it will send it over MQTT. The server receives them. You don’t really need the server if you just want to read raw signals. The reason the server exists though, is because usually more than one detector will pick up the same beacon’s signals at the same time. But it can determine how strong they were. The server will receive both over MQTT but will be smart enough to know that the beacon is most likely closer to the detector that got the strongest signal from it. So the server is used to reconcile that info from all of the detectors together since the detectors don’t talk with each other directly to determine that.
No, right now MQTT is the only supported option. But the firmware and hardware is open source, so you’re free to add some other protocol you’d like if you wanted to.
No, I have not tried it with the Trackr devices specifically. I think it should work, but not having tried one I can’t guarantee it.
Great, thanks,
What are the chances of a future release powered by a battery? A coin cell would be great, but i would be happy with a transistor battery too.
Here is what I want to do. I want to put it in an empty electrical box and have a blank faceplate on so that it blends in. Maybe have a tri state led on the face plate that shows when it’s detecting a le tracker, when it’s not detecting anything, and when the battery is low. Something like that.
Probably not gonna happen, unfortunately. It uses wifi for the MQTT communication by way of the ESP8266 chip and at the same time also powers an always-on-scanning BLE chip (Nordic nRF51822). All together it’s not a huge power hog, drawing about 150 mA at 5 V (0.75 Watts) but no way that would ever work from a coin-cell battery. You could get a few days with one of those big phone power banks maybe?
I also wouldn’t recommend a metal electrical box, because it would act as a Faraday cage and make the thing not work well at detecting BLE or talking over wifi. A plastic one will be just fine though.
Wish Tesla had been more successful with wireless power.
Need some way to power it through a nice un-obtrusive container. Something about the same shape as a Amazon Dot, or a lightify hub. Maybe I could gut an extra lightify hub I have, I wonder what voltage that runs on?
Did you resolve this issue ? Seem to be having the same problem that OwnTracks is not updating HA when entering/leaving the iBeacon region.
OwnTracks is popping up a notification each time it detects a transision, so it’s picking up the beacon OK. And similar to you, when using geofencing it appears to play nicely with HA.
I followed something similar, and wrote up this script:
I hope it’s useful to someone. My plan is to add bluetooth4.0 adaptors to my O2 Jogglers which are acting as Logitech Media Server (squeezebox) clients, and running this in the background
I have 4 happy bubbles, one in our home office, one in the living room and one on both sides of the bed.
Currently I’m test running, but the idea is to set up a number of automations based on it.
First impressions are positive. The HP pick up the beacons as expected and I hardly see any false positives so far (still experimenting with where exactly to position the HB’s, especially now that I also had enclosures 3D-printed to protect them (but which have impact on the range).
I started with Avvel large and Blukii Large, Blukii Small beacons.
I had 4 Avvel ones, of which 2 stopped working suddenly in about 4 months. I could not get it to work even after changing the battery.
Small Blukii I had 3 all of them stopped after 3 months, I did not change the batteries yet to see if I can get it to work.
I have one large Blukii and another Avvel one still going strong in our cars with the original battery after 7 months.
If you don’t mind the size, I would suggest Blukii Large ones.
I use the Nordic nRF Connect app on iOS and Android all the time and it works for testing. But both Android and iOS want to reduce battery usage so both OS’s will sometimes stop the beacons apps in the background, so the apps are not as reliable as dedicated beacons.
Having tested many, I like the ones I sell in my store the most. They’re small, wearable, reliable, and have pretty good battery life. It’s why I order them wholesale from the manufacturer and resell them.
I haven’t yet tried any Avvel or Blukii ones, but it’s a shame they break.
Tracker: Mi band(waterproof, long batterylife) with bluetooth broadcast enabled.
Several raspberry pi zero w with node-red, polling bluetooth and sending data (emulated ibeacon) over mqtt to the happy bubbles server.
The happy bubbles server reports to HASS.
