Home Assistant Community Add-on: Happy Bubbles

This add-on is provided by the Home Assistant Community Add-ons project.

GitHub Release GitLab CI Project Stage Project Maintenance

Supports armhf Architecture Supports armv7 Architecture Supports aarch64 Architecture Supports amd64 Architecture Supports i386 Architecture

About


Presence detection server for Happy Bubbles Bluetooth beacon-based presence detection system.

This add-on is a server that subscribes to MQTT topics that the “Happy Bubbles” Bluetooth Beacon Presence Detectors publish to. It checks to see which of the detectors found the strongest signal for a particular beacon, and then lets you access that info either over an API, or a web interface.

It is designed to be used as a home-automation presence detection system. If you install the detectors through-out a home and family members carry beacons around the house, you can program your home automation hubs to take certain actions depending on who entered or left certain rooms.

This add-on also publishes changes in location to a particular topic. So you can program your hub to listen for these and make the desired changes as they happen, to not have to keep polling it.

Installation


The installation of this add-on is pretty straightforward and not different in comparison to installing any other add-on.

  1. Search for the “Happy Bubbles” add-on in the add-on store and install it.
  2. Start the “Happy Bubbles” add-on
  3. Check the logs of the “Happy Bubbles” add-on to see if everything went well.

:books: Please read the documentation for more information about the use and configuration of this add-on.

Support


You can always try to get support from the community here at the Home Assistant community forums, join the conversation!

Questions? You have several options to get them answered:

You could also open an issue on GitHub, in case you ran into a bug, or maybe you have an idea on improving the addon:

:information_source: At this moment our Home Assistant Community Add-ons Discord chat server and GitHub are our only official support channels. All others rely on community effort.

Repository on GitHub


Looking for more add-ons?


The primary goal of our add-ons project is to provide you (as a Home Assistant user) with additional, high quality, add-ons that allow you to take your automated home to the next level.

Check out some of our other add-ons in our Home Assistant Community Add-ons project.

3 Likes

About the author of this add-on

Hi there!

I am Franck Nijhof, and I have 30 years of programming experience, in many languages. I am using this experience to work on the Home Assistant project by giving back my knowledge and time to the open source community.

The add-on you are currently looking at right now was developed/packaged by me. It is not the only add-on I have created; there are many many more :wink:

However, I have a problem… I am an addict. A :coffee: addict that is. Lucky for you, I turn that C8H10N4O2 (caffeine molecule) into code (and add-ons)!

If you want to show your appreciation, consider supporting me for buying a cup of high octane wakey juice via one of the platforms below! :heart:

Sponsor Frenck via GitHub Sponsors

Support Frenck on Patreon

Enjoy your add-on, while I enjoy the brain juice. :coffee:

Thanks for all the :two_hearts:

…/Frenck

Join our Discord server Follow me on Twitter Flollow me on Instragram Follow me on GitHub Follow me on YouTube Follow me on Twitch patreon-icon

P.S.: In case you want to ask me a question: AMA (Ask Me Anything). Most of the time I am online at the Discord chat. (I go by @Frenck in there as well).

1 Like

I’m running Home-Assistant on my raspberry pi, but I’m not using hassio (I use my own installer).

How can I use this feature? (I don’t have the intention to migrate to hassio, just to be clear). Is there a way to install these addons on a “stock” home-asisstant installation?

No there is not. This is an Hass.io feature.
Sorry m8.

You can install the happy bubbles presence server on your rpi. Just go check out the official happy bubbles site for more details on getting it up and running. I had it working fine on my rpi with hassbian install.

Great work @frenck. I might have found a little bug though.

A reboot of hassio removes beacons from ‘added beacons’. Have to re-add them from ‘latest beacons seen’ each time. As hinted by @nemik, something might go wrong with the database where they are stored (presence.db).

Hmmm interesting… Will take a look :slight_smile:

Opened an issue to work on: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-happy-bubbles/issues/1

@frenck Thanks a lot for building this extension, it’s really cool! Were any parts of the Happy Bubbles Presence server particularly difficult to work with that you might suggest for me to change?

Enjoy your coffee!

It was pretty ok to containerize and create an add-on out of it.
Nevertheless, the bolt database, in particular, is a little strange, mainly because it is opened directly from ./presence.db. Would be better if it actually looked up his current directory or provides the option to have it somewhere else.

The presence server code is pretty basic, but it works, looks cools and does the job pretty well. Nevertheless, you should consider moving away from bolt, since the project is actually abandoned…

:coffee: Thank you very much!

:tada: Release v0.2.0

This version adds the persistent storage of the presence database & settings.

Full Changelog

Added

  • Persists presence database & settings

Thanks for reporting @jeroenjoosse :+1:

Thanks! That’s a great suggestion. I’ve just created a 1.8.1 release for you that makes the presence file configurable with the -db_file="/some/path/file.db" flag when running the executable.

Changing bolt DB is more than this quick two-line change so I’ll have to leave that for another day. As the project says, it’s stable enough for now.

Thanks!

I’ll update this in the next release of the add-on. Currently I worked around it (hit the Changelog in the release announcement), by starting it shortly to generate a db, moving it, and creating a symlink.

Ps. You could also optimize your Docker container a lot. Maybe I’ll put up a PR soon to help you guys out with that.

Oooph, yea symlinking like that sounds like a pain. I should have made this change earlier.

The Dockerfile was a contribution from another user, would be happy to accept any improvements you can offer, thanks!

:tada: Release v0.3.0

Full Changelog

Fixed

  • Fixes add-on running on host network

Changed

  • Updates Happy Bubbles Presence to v1.8.1
  • Small refactor to use new presence server options
1 Like

Sorry frenck i think i must be missing something, i’ve setup the Happy Bubble got IP address tested Mqtt getting “{“rssi”:-57, “heap_free”:25688}” message. I’ve got no errors from the your addon but when i open the web ui it does not register any beacons just seems to be searching.
any help appreciated. also using room room assistant so i know the beacons are transmitting.

Update: was user error i was using incorrect mqtt topic.

I’m also having the this issue. I get “{“rssi”:-80, “heap_free”:21224}”, happy bubbles are operational. Nothing when scanning for beacons.

Interestingly, if I install alongside hassbian via https://www.happybubbles.tech/presence/docs/rpi3_setup everything works great, but I would much rather get this working in hass.io.

@happybubbles Any clue what cloud be wrong here?

When exploring this more I went back to hassbian, then went back to a fresh hass.io install and now everything is working great. Zero issues.

Sorry I don’t have a hass.io setup to test with. I had been running the new code though, with a custom DB file (not the default) since the release and it’s been working fine. The only thing I could think of is if it wasn’t connecting to MQTT correctly or a wrong server?

:tada: Release v0.4.0

Full Changelog

Changed

  • Moves build-env to latest
  • Upgrades base image to v1.4.2
  • Upgrades presence server to v1.8.2
  • Rewrites GitLab CI
  • Upgrades base image in GitLab CI to 1.4.2