Good BLE beacon for kids

Hardware
1

Thought I would quickly share for anyone that is looking for BLE beacon that kids would wear consistently, the UNICEF Kid PowerBand works great. They are rechargeable and since it’s a gamification of a pedometer the kids (at least mine) are religious about keeping them charged at night to beat their siblings the next day. My kids have had them for about a year now and they hold up well.
I’m using them tied in to room-assistant to turn on and off lights for the kids.

2 Likes
2

How long does it last on one charge again?

3

According to the Unicef website, about a week.

1 Like
4

Yeah, they last about a week, sometimes more as the synchronization (of step counts to the app) process is manually triggered and if the kids refrain from syncing constantly it can go longer.

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5

This will be something to keep in mind for when my kids get a little older. For now I’m happy if they keep their pants on.

6

Can you please share the room-assistant config. I am trying to make it work but it shows nothing. Its just get stuck.

1056×198 20 KB

7

Sure, below is what I have. However what you are seeing is normal for the startup of room-assistant, it won’t output anything to the console UNLESS you have set the enabled value for console to true.

I use the whitelist in my config as there is a surprising amount of BLE devices my RPi can pick up.

{
  "app": {
    "unsafe": false
  },
  "mqtt": {
    "enabled": true,
    "url": "mqtt://192.168.10.118",
    "username": "XXXXX",
    "password": "XXXXX",
    "reject_unauthorized": true,
    "topic": "tuckers-room"
  },
  "console": {
    "enabled": false
  },
  "ble": {
    "enabled": true,
    "channel": "room_presence",
    "max_distance": 15,
    "whitelist": ["f8e8875d2474", "f74ca33698ea", "0cf3ee00b99e", "0cf3ee00b974"],
    "use_mac": false,
    "system_noise": 0.01,
    "measurement_noise": 3,
    "update_frequency": 0
  },
  "ibeacon": {
    "enabled": false,
    "channel": "room_presence",
    "max_distance": 0,
    "whitelist": [],
    "system_noise": 0.01,
    "measurement_noise": 3
  },
  "temper": {
    "enabled": false,
    "channel": "temper",
    "interval": 60000,
    "scale": 1,
    "offset": 0
  },
  "gpio": {
    "enabled": false,
    "only_send_updates": true,
    "ports": [],
    "qos": 0,
    "retain": false
  },
  "shell": {
    "enabled": false,
    "commands": [],
    "qos": 0,
    "retain": false
  }
}
8

Resurrecting and old thread. Do these things function as a full fledged BLE beacon with UUID, Major, Minor, etc? Can’t find anything mentioning their use as one.

9

I’m looking for the same for my kids too. since it has been so long, i’m wondering what other alternative is there now?