BLE Beacon with iOS Automation to open garage door

[DigiH]

@jhv

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “use the iPhone itself to open the correct garage door as soon as it gets into range”. What method do I use to determine if the phone is in range or not? Are you saying I need to use Theengs Gateway or something similar to detect when my phone enters within range of the Bluetooth signal from the HA server?

Yes, use the iPhone to detect when it is coming close to your home, with the Theengs Gateway Add-on or any other of several other methods available for this.

So that when the iPhone changes from Away to Home the garage door automatically opens.

But dedicated Bluetooth trackers will do the same and if they are always in the car they will also work in case you do forget your iPhone on some days An advantage with the iPhone though is that is has a randomly changing Bluetooth MAC address for privacy, which you can only use for tracking knowing its Identity Resolving Key - that means it’s not possible for others to know of the presence of your iPhone, while Bluetooth trackers usually have static Bluetooth MAC addresses, so having them in the cars would theoretically also mean that others could detect the presence of the cars - a possbile theoretical privacy concerns.

Ideally you would also get Bluetooth beacons for this which also broadcast their battery status, so that you can swap the battery when it gets low, instead of only realising a dead battery when the garage door doesn’t open

@jhv

So if I were to use a different beacon for each vehicle, then the beacons can be identified and matched to the right car or bike to open the correct door. What kind of range do these beacons have knowing the beacon is I’ll be inside the car and the monitor is inside the house behind metal garage doors? I assume some type of monitoring device will need to be used that is positioned close to the garage which then feeds the information back to HA?

Yes, each beacon can be identified individually, and their reception reach can be extended with ESP32 proxies on the same WiFi network positioned close to the garage doors for ideal reception.