I’m using my RPi’s onboard Bluetooth. I know it works, because I’ve got 2 Bluetooth thermometers working with the SwitchBot Bluetooth integration and they’re showing up just fine and reporting as they should.
I can’t get anything to show up in iBeacon Tracker, though. I had a Feasycom beacon that showed up briefly, but I was messing with some of the settings and deleted the beacon from the integration, then tried to undelete it by modifying the core.device_registry file and never saw it again, and ended up locking myself out of the beacon’s settings (which shouldn’t have been possible, but apparently I am more powerful than I expect).
Anyway, I have a new beacon. It’s a Blue Charm BC04P and it’s showing up just fine in the associated Android app, so I know it’s working. I don’t want to mess with it unless I know what I’m doing because I don’t want to accidentally cause it to spontaneously combust or something.
It’s very frustrating that the iBeacon Tracker integration doesn’t seem to have a “scan” command or anything. The way I got it to find the previous beacon was just setting the beacon near my RPi and crossing my fingers and waiting… hours? Days? Eventually they showed up.
I got the new Blue Charm beacon yesterday, and turned it on and put it in the same place. I guess it’s about 3 feet away. I could move it closer, I suppose. But I see posts online where people complain about the iBeacon Tracker detecting all sorts of weird devices, and I’m just not getting anything. I’ve never gotten anything past the one beacon that one time.
Is there something I should put in my configuration.yaml file? Some kind of magic incantation?
My settings: iBeacon Tracker: I enabled debug logging. “Enable newly added entities” is on. “Enable polling for updates” is on. Bluetooth integration: “Passive scanning” is on.
It’s very possible that the default setting of your BlueCharm BC04P is not using the iBeacon protocol, but a more proprietary format.
You could try our Theengs Gateway Add-On if you’re already familiar with MQTT, which should register and auto-discover your BlueCharm BC04P with said protocol, as a device tracker along with its temperature, acceleration x/y/z-axis and voltage.
Probably not your issue (since th iBeacons should be broadcasting all the time anyway), but my understanding is this option explicitly makes it so your BT adapter ONLY listens passively for devices. Unchecking it means it’s actively searching for devices and asking them to broadcast.
Whelp, I don’t know if anything I did fixed the problem, but this morning (about 1.5 hours ago) nothing was showing up under iBeacon. I unplugged the RPi and plugged it back in again to reboot the whole system. Nothing was still showing up about 15 minutes later. I went into the system and changed the configuration of both iBeacon Tracker and the Bluetooth integration: System options for both of them set to “Enable newly added entities” = off, “Enable polling for updates” = off, and under “Configure” for Bluetooth, “Passive scanning” = off.
Now I just went in and it found the beacon. Not sure which magic incantation did the trick, but maybe this will help someone in the future.
That’s even more confusing. Turning off newly added entities STOPS adding new found Bluetooth devices to Home Assistant, so it should not be adding anything once you turn that off.
Coming back to this months later with the same issue, and followed my documented steps, albeit a bit slower this time to help test a bit. I think it was the disabling of the “Passive scanning” under Bluetooth that did the trick, but I’m not sure. I did still uncheck “Enable newly added entities” and “Enable polling for updates”.