I’ve tried endlessly to make this work but for the life of me I cannot get my iBeacon to mark away. Docs says it takes a few minutes for away status but I can literally be away or even turn it off and it’ll stay home forever until I restart HA and it’ll be marked unavailable. I know the Bluetooth and HA are picking it up fine because every time I’ve added it or had it marked unavailable from the restarts it takes only seconds for it to update status. Really trying to find a way to do presence detection with this but I feel I’m just spinning my wheels.
Here’s the iBeacon I went with and have seen others online using this same brand with luck but can’t figure out where I’m going wrong.
So, over on Github (I am responding here since this platform is more suitable for back and forth troubleshooting), you said “I’ve set it up like that as well set the state to blank to monitor for any changes at all. Even on the device page under iBeacon tracker integration it never changes. I’d buy a dozen of these things if only they worked reliably.”
Just the clarify, you are using iBeacon Tracker Integration on HA with the HA doing the scanning, right? No BLE extender or ESP, right?
If so, do you see the beacon in the iBeacon Tracker Integration?
Once I had the beacon showing up in the iBeacon Tracker Intergation, I then made two automations: One for when the beacon changes state from home to away, and another from away to home.
In your comment above, you mention you marked the beacon state to blank, which I don’t understand at all. Maybe that is where we are differing? (Sorry, I am not much of an HA expert).
Could you maybe strip everything back to bare bones using the HA iBeacon Tracker Integration plus the two automations that I used, and see if that works?
I have used your automations and they’re not working unfortunately. What I mean by my blank state remark was I left the to and from empty so the automation should trigger any time there’s any change no matter what it be.
I don’t know if this will help, but here are some screenshots of my setup. I took shots of the things that I understand, but if there are some other deeper HA settings you would like to see, just explain to me where to find them and I will screenshot those for you also.
As I said, I am using the iBeacon Tracker Integration running on HA with the HA doing the scanning, i.e. no BLE proxy or ESP or whatever.
Note also that I am turning the beacon on and off to simulate going away and coming back. It’s easier to just sit here at my computer for testing. But I have also tested this setup while actually moving away from the HA and then coming back to the HA and it works exactly the same.
Note 2: the HA reports the beacon coming home very quickly with only a couple second delay from when I turn the beacon ON to when the logger reports it home. Going away is much slower. The delay can be several minutes. In the example below, the delay was about 2.5 minutes, i.e. I turned OFF the beacon, but the logger did not report it away until about 2.5 minutes later.
Beacon Details:
(just ignore the Automations list since I have tried all different things with this beacon. The only two automations I am using now are shown in detailed screenshots lower down this page)
@BlueCharmBeacons thanks for your responses but I only wish I had the same luck. Been working at this for over a month and never once has it been marked away whether it was me leaving and literally being away or by turning the beacon off. I’m fine with it taking a little bit to mark away just as long as it eventually does, I’m more in need of it making home promptly. Like I said, powering off and restarting HA marks as unavailable but when I power back on it switches from unavailable to home within 2-5 seconds. Sadly it just stand there.
instead of using the iBeacon protocol with the BlueCharms, using the KSensor protocol and OpenMQTTGateway on an ESP32 to receive their BLE braodcasts, and turning on Presence in its setting,
the BC04P should be auto-discovered as presence trackers, published as MQTT messages, plus additionally also have its temperature and acceleration properties decoded and discovered/displayed.
I cannot really say what the problem ther might be, but am sure someone else form the team, more knowledgeable about the Theengs Gateway Add-On, will reply to what is causing this.
My suggestion above was only referring to OpenMQTTGatway installed on an ESP32 though, as the tracking/presence functionality has only been implemented there so far, and not in the Theengs Gateway Add-On.
Maybe a silly question, but are you really sure you have the right iBeacon, and not another stationary one you didn’t realise was there using the same protocol?
I use several bluecharm beacons and they work great. I think the delay issues are with HA because I can see the broadcasts in realtime in the kbeacon app and espressense which is what i use for room presence detection. It takes a lot of playing around with the settings to get things right because 1 beacon can be detected by multiple base stations so you have to play around with the settings to get some overlap but not to much overlap. The iBeacon integration drives me nuts, I gave up with it. It constantly creates duplicate entities, they’re never accurate and slow as hell to update. I had issues with espresense at first and kept having to restart nodes because they’d freeze or run out of memory i’m not sure. I just made an automation that restarts all my nodes every 6 hours and no more issues.
