Hi Au,
I am not sure what is happening on the HA side, but here’s a few tips:
To check the signal strength of the beacon, use the scan page on KBeaconPro. It’s the first page that shows when you open the app. If there are too many things showing up there, and it gets difficult to see your target beacon, use the filter method at the top of the page so that only your target beacon shows on the scan screen.
Now put the beacon down somewhere and walk with your phone away from the beacon. The RSSI strength number should get weaker, i.e. lower and lower. For example, if it was -35 at the start, it will change to -43 then -56 then -68, etc. as you walk away from the beacon.
Be sure to restart the scan on the KBeaconPro app every so often since it will automatically time out. Just tap the “Scan” button in the upper right corner when it appears again (i.e. the scan has timed out). During the scan, the Scan button will change to Stop.
Be sure not to stay connected to the beacon with the KBeaconPro app. Staying connected stops the beacon from working. Connecting is only for configuring, then when done, you need to disconnect.
Assuming the RSSI numbers shown on the KBeaconPro app screen are behaving as expected, then the beacon is fine.
Re power setting for the beacon: You should not set it higher than needed. Default is 0, and it sounds like you have turned it up to +8. If you need it that powerful for your usage case, then fine. If not, I would recommend you turn it down to save battery power. Also, lower TX power levels are more stable. That said, this is not the reason why you are seeing unstable distance readings on your HA.
Some random speculation on the HA side:
First, a guess: You may have misidentified your target iBeacon when you first started. You might be tracking some other BLE item instead of your beacon.
Distance: The distance figures jumping around oddly could be caused by something wrong with your bluetooth dongle. These distance figures are calculated by your HA using a mathematical formula with the RSSI numbers as the key input. So if you already checked the RSSI numbers from the beacon (described above), and they are fine, then the only reason for the distance numbers to be weird is something being wrong with the dongle or maybe some strange thing happening with the HA. Some HA experts here can help on this.
Re: “the solution is using the KBeacon protocol via ESPresense/ESP32s instead”: Maybe this is just a wording mistake by someone, but this makes no sense and in fact is not possible. There is no such thing as “KBeacon protocol”. All our beacons use standard iBeacon protocol. They work fine with any scanner that scans for iBeacons.
Someone may have been having trouble with the iBeacon protocol because their scanner setup was wrong, then they switched on our KSensor protocol (broadcasts xyz accelerometer data) to try to fix the problem. Then after making twelve more adjustments to their scanner/HA , everything started to work, so they concluded that using KSensor was the magical trick. But I can assure you that it is not. Using our standard iBeacon protocol will work fine as long as the scanner is setup correctly.
By the way, I wrote a comment one time about how to set up and use the iBeacon Tracker integration. Hopefully it is still roughly the same process now: Anyone else experience issues with iBeacons? - #5 by BlueCharmBeacons