I am currently working on the presence detection for my home and not sure what’s the best approach.
First of all I would like to track some phones.
But there are two different ways to accomplish this:
One way is using the phones as BLE iBeacon transmitters and ESPs as beacon trackers.
The other one would be to use ESPs as iBeacons and the phones as beacon monitors.
Now the main question is: What will be more energy efficient on the phones (with comparable accuracy and responsiveness)?
With approach 1 the phones will obviously be sending BLE signals regularly which might drain the battery.
On the other hand with approach 2 the phone will receive BLE signals which might be more energy efficient but reporting the sensor data over wifi will probably use even more energy than sending an iBeacon.
Is there any data of the energy cunsumptions of these two methods?
They both are battery intensive features but nobody has done the research on which is better in that regard. Now they both offer settings you can adjust to help with battery life but you’ll need to play around with it. If you want to use the new iBeacon integration you’ll want to use the transmitter.
hello, does anyone knows how to set up the approach 2 with beacon monitor?
I activated the sensor in the companion app but I don’t know how to fetch the UUID sensor of distance range? Thanks in advance
the UUID is something you set in the beacon itself, so you’ll need to look at your ESPHome configuration for that part. The UUID is also given in teh attribute of the sensor when it finds a beacon
I am using those ibeacons and can see there UUID on nrf connect.
I would also like to see them in HASSIO.
Do you think those beacons are note compatible or I have to use esphome?
Thanks !
The beacon monitor sensor might detect them I’m not sure. If you want the new iBeacon integration to pick them up then you’ll need Bluetooth added to the server or set up esphome Bluetooth proxy
Using the phone as a beacon monitor (scanner) will use a lot more of the phone’s battery:
If you use the ESP as scanner, and it uses USB wall current, you won’t need to worry about the current usage on the scanner side. That’s leaves the easier job, broadcasting, to the phone.
That said, using a phone to do either job will often have less than satisfactory/reliable results over time. To have the phone act as a beacon or a scanner, you will need to have an app running on the phone constantly. In this case, you will use HA companion with beacon transmitter turned on. Under normal circumstances it will work well. But as the phone’s OS attempts to maximize the phone’s battery life, it will gradually deprioritize apps, first by sending them to the background and giving them fewer resources, then by gradually starving them of resources. Finally they may be killed by the OS. Only a very few special apps, such as music playing apps, are truly protected by the OS. This is a problem both on Android phones and iPhones.
I don’t think you are seeing the broadcast uuid major minor in nRF Connect. I think it only shows you the service and characteristic uuids. I’m not sure about this though and can’t do a test at this moment. there is one app that can show you the broadcast uuid for sure; it’s called Beacon Scope by David Young in the Google play store. No iPhone version though.
Another good way to get the broadcast uuid is to use the beacon manufacturer’s configuration app. Use it to connect to the beacon then find the broadcast uuid major minor, then just copy and paste.
Ok in the case I am capable of finding the uuid major and minor of my tag, I don’t see where I should paste those since all configuration of beacons in HASSIO seems to be happening via the dashboard? Should it be in the config Yaml? This process of setting up beacons is not yet clear for me… Thanks again !
The problem for me is that either the Transmitter or the iBeacon integration is not working as expected. I do only get updates of the entities every now and then. They are often minutes apart. This makes the integration 100% useless.
Has there been any updates on this? Im still seeing issues where the ha app only intermittently sends beacons regardless of what power level and frequency i set it to.
Sometimes it will be going strong and then out of nowhere it just stops
Thanks again !