BLE beacons for garbage bins

Has anyone used BLE beacons to monitor if their garbage bins have been put out?

How did you do it?

Which beacons?

Did you use an ESPHome BLE proxy?

Can you tell the proxy to only monitor certain devices or does it discover every random passer-by with a smart phone?

Any other pitfalls, advice or a project write up?

I’ve been using a beacon on my single bin for a couple of years (Texas has only one type - “trash”). It is a Blue Charm Beacon. No big hurdles. Originally, I was using ESPresence which used the MQTT integration, which worked well for this use case as you can filter the beacons it reports on. I have a proxy on the wall of our dining room which was less than 10 feet from the bin when stored and filtered specifically looking for this iBeacon. When the bin went to the curb it was far enough away from the receiver that it dropped off completely so a binary sensor worked well.

I’ve recently moved to Bermuda which is less reliable as I haven’t yet dialed in the calibration, plus it doesn’t do filtering to specific beacons.

The beacon has been reliable, and the battery lasts a year or more. I have it attached to the bin with duct tape, and it’s survived the weather well.

For both ESPresence and Bermuda the proxies pick up every random beacon they see, but they don’t store them as entities. For ESPresence you specify the exact beacons to track in YAML configuration, with Bermuda you choose them from a list of currently seen beacons.

I’ve used the M5 Atom proxies for both, you can flash with ESPresence or ESPHome. ESPresence only does beacon tracking, where ESPHome is a true bluetooth proxy, which is nice. I haven’t used the proxy function yet but hope to add some BLE plant monitors after the holidays.

My automation is pretty simple, the night before trash day if the binary sensor is on meaning the beacon is visible announce to take out the trash via the Amazon echos. The next morning if still on, announce a final warning. In the evenings of trash day if the binary sensor is off, announce to go retrieve the bin. That’s it.

There are probably newer beacons now, the one I linked is several years old. I would choose one that sends an iBeacon. With a mobile app you can configure the power, the frequency of the beacon updates, and you get the battery level.

Hope that helps.

Tom, I use Bluecharm beacons for exactly this.

Im using Bermuda to get rough position but there’s also a raw distance in the data.

Either way I’m basically using a smoothing template on it to keep the bounce low. Then.a threshold sensor.

Dist >0 but < A at driveway
Dist >A and < B at curb
Dist > B your neighbors are thieves or a tornado happened… :smiling_imp:

Works great. And one of the blue harm models has a small plastic case seemingly purpose built for being epoxied to the back of a large plastic bin (yes it came with tape but…)

Edit: Martin hate to mince words man. Texas here. And I have a recycle bin doing this too…