Hi cipnt:
First off, I had a staff member check our website for UK shipping. It seemed like it was not working properly, so they made some adjustments, and now it is working OK. UK postal codes are a bit difficult for us Americans to understand, but I just entered a test order using London EC1V 2NX, and it seemed to work ok. If you change your mind and decide to order from us, let me know if you have any issues checking out.
The current requirement is still a minimum of 3 beacons per international order, but if that is causing you concern, let me know, and I can have them turn off that requirement for a day.
The shipping charge to the UK is still a bit high, but if you guys hadn’t decided to declare independence from the USA, you would be paying USA domestic postal rates like Puerto Rico.
Re other sellers in the UK: The only one I have heard of is called beaconzone. Super smart guy runs it. You can google their website. But I think they may have stopped selling retail and only focus on big business projects now. Double check though to be sure, as my info may be out of date.
Now, back to your project: As I understand, you want to use the HA to track a beacon, and then trigger automations based on the beacon being in range or out of range. That is workable, and I have already setup test projects like that here on my HA using the iBeacon Tracker integration as the engine. I have posted about this here: Anyone else experience issues with iBeacons? - #5 by BlueCharmBeacons
If you want to do what this thread’s OP wanted to do, I can’t say for sure. His idea of having a map show the location of the beacon inside his house would be possible, but only with multiple BLE scanners located in each room. In other words, he could achieve “room presence”. But I am not sure how he would display that on a map.
Re keyfinder vs beacon: Keep in mind that these are two different functions. A key finder will broadcast a signal that an app on your phone will monitor. Once the apps notices that the signal is no longer appearing, it will send you an alert: “the signal from the keys is now missing so they have gotten too far away from your phone!”.
You can use either…
1: the Chipolo app on an iPhone or Android and the Chipolo ONE “beacon”
OR
2: the Apple Find My app on an iPhone and the Chipolo ONE SPOT “beacon”
OK, that’s keyfinding; enjoy!
The second issue is that it sounds like you also want the HA to use this same Chipolo “beacon’s” range as a trigger for automations. Can that be done??? That’s the big question!
Why am I putting “beacon” in quotes above? Because I am not sure if the Chipolo is actually broadcasting a legit iBeacon protocol beacon signal. If it is, then no problem. But I doubt that it is. I think it is probably broadcasting some modified protocol that only it’s own app or the Apply Find My app can recognize.
Back to your earlier post: You said that the HA is not recognizing/seeing your ONE. So that makes me think that the Chipolo ONE is not broadcasting the iBeacon protocol that the iBeacon Tracker integration wants to see. It is probably broadcasting BLE “funky proprietary” non-beacon protocol which will include a MAC address, so some other HA integrations might be able to “see” the Chipolo ONE and trigger automations. But that’s outside of my experience to date, so I can only speculate.
The Chipolo ONE SPOT might be broadcasting the iBeacon protocol that the HA iBeacon Tracker integration is looking for, but you would need to test that or ask around this forum. Someone must have tried it and confirmed it (I hope), otherwise it should not be on the iBeacon Tracker compatible product list. But there may have been some misunderstanding that led to it being put there by mistake. The integration builders have no way of confirming this stuff on their own, aside from going out and buying a bunch of sample beacons themselves, which is not practical.
[I need to apply for a tech support job with Chipolo! )