Bluetooth and iBeacon integrations are pretty slick! Maybe there can be a way to determine which Bluetooth proxy an iBeacon is connected to? Then we might have an easier time doing some automations based on what room the iBeacon is in.
Where do you see the ibeacon data.
I added the integration but I can’t see anything, nor do I see an entity.
Where is it?
The iBeacon integration only works with certain iBeacon hardware. This is the list of iBeacon hardware that it confirmed works with:
Are you using any of these iBeacon devices?
I’m using the companion app, as far as I have understood it should work.
Yeah I had this thought straight away… The examples used describe sensing when the dustbin is further away based on distance. This makes sense if you just have one BLE adapter or proxy… Hopefully the team have plans in the works for if you have multiple…
Perfect topic for WTH month?
Yeah you’re right - it really looks like it should work given the sensor in the Companion App (on Android) called “BLE Transmitter” which specifically mentions acting like an iBeacon…But even after turning on that sensor, the iBeacon integration isn’t finding my phone. The iBeacon integration does work with my BlueCharm iBeacons though.
Ok… but still where do you see this? I don’t get a sensor or anything
After I added the iBeacon integration, according to its default settings, it scanned for everything BLE around me (and I mean EVERYTHING), then when I clicked on the devices list, it was populated with a long list of BLE items plus my other devices. You can filter the list to only show Beacon Tracker integration devices. In my case, that was still a long long list, so then I just searched that list for the beacon I wanted to use for my test automation.
The BLE items are shown according to their name. There is no UUID or major or minor displayed, but that works fine for me.
The device name of the proxy is shown as the attribute “source” of the device-tracker
it takes some time for the sensors to show up from what I have been seeing on my end. Most android devices also randomize the mac address so after 10 advertisements HA core will combine them all. If you don’t see anything being detected set Transmit Power to High and see if that helps. We may need to work on a troubleshooting section after we get through these initial runs 
I wish someone that understand the iBeacon could add to the released documentation. I added it during the October beta and I sill have know idea on how it should work. I have 2 Bluetooth proxies and the Android companion app on three devices. Looking at the IBeacon integration the number of devices mostly grows. Sometimes it reduces but not seeing anything useful. From the UUID I can figure out which device is seen, but not where. Most of my sensors (except the Govee) go to unknown during the day.,
Hi, i have a problem with the integration, it reports the distance but not the active source.
I f i restart homeassistant, the source is correct, but if i move the beacon to another proxy, the source will not change.
Someone with the same Problem ?
1 Like
@multigcs, I have the same issue. If I physically move an iBeacon from one BT Proxy to another the source attribute doesn’t update. I was planning on using these to detect cars in the driveway and garbage cans, but without an accurate source attribute (and multiple BT Proxies) its just not feasible. I do think this is a bug, hopefully they fix it soon.
i think it is in the next core release
2 Likes
I had exactly the same problems trying to figure this when I started with ESPHome and installed multiple BLE proxies to detect where my iBeacons were.
The solution is to use ESPresense instead of the BLE proxy.
This is how an ESP32 board with BLE proxy appears in home assistant:
Compare this to how the same board appears with ESPresense:
At the time of writing, getting room presence detection working properly is still pretty cumbersome.
Here are some additional details worth knowing:
- When installing ESPresense on the ESP32 board, skip the step asking for your SSID and wifi password. Instead you need to connect to the captive wifi-portal from the ESP32 board starting with “espresense-”, navigate to IP 192.168.4.1 and set your SSID and wifi password via the GUI. Then click restart and finish the setup for MQTT.
- ESPresense is not actually a part of ESPHome so if you just want to setup room presence detection you don’t need to install the add-on. The ESP32 boards will appear as MQTT devices. (You of course will need an MQTT broker like mosquito)
- You need to create your own sensors in your configuration.yaml as explained here in order to detect the room where your BLE devices are. Unfortunately these sensors are not connected to the iBeacons or any other device.
Here is how the custom sensor for ESPresense looks in home assistant. Notice in particular that the sensor state is the room name.
Here is how a iBeacon looks. It has a “home”/“not_home” status and then a distance. As far as I can tell the “source” attribute is not the MAC address of the BLE node which is detecting the iBeacon.
Lets hope that in the not too distant future ESPresense can be managed via ESPHome and that the iBeacon integration will start telling us which BLE node they are connected to.
1 Like
I can report that with a BLE Proxy (m5stack-atom with esp-idf framework), my Govee humidity sensor does show up on iBeacon with the BLE Proxy MAC Address as the source attribute. I am using Home Assistant 2024.12.5.