Thought I might give it a try for tracking but does the PI 3 itself have bluetooth? And does that the communicate with phones directly? Or does the Pi communicate with other beacons which then sense phones? The Bluetooth documentation is extremely vague…
The PI3 does have bluetooth built in. When you turn on the bluetooth tracking component, you need to open your bluetooth on your phone and scan for devices. HA will see you scanning for a phone and add the bluetooth mac address to the known_devices.yaml file. After that, whenever the bluetooth component which scans every 10 or 12 seconds sees a device in the known_devices.yaml file, it will report it as “home”. After 180 seconds (default) of not seeing the bluetooth device, the device is reported as “away” or “not_home”.
I am missing some specifics, but that is it in general.
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Thanks! 