iBeacons for indoor pet collar (dogs, cats, and etc?)

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Quite a few of my iBeacon customers have told me about cool HA projects that they have set up with beacons on the collars of their dogs and cats. Especially cats. But one of the issues they always ask about is how to attach the iBeacon to the collar.

(I should first say that I have three indoor cats with beacons on their collars for many years now. So the notes below are my personal experience.)

The simple approach is to attach the beacon on the same loop as the pet’s name tag. Sometimes when they shake, the name tag and the beacon make an annoying clink clink sound though. In that case, I have successfully used a small piece of double back tape to attach the name tag on the front of the beacon to stop them from banging against each other.

But some cats are notorious “dippers”. No, not chewing tobacco; they dip their beacons into their water bowls when they drink water. For me, with lots and lots of beacons laying around, I just replace the beacon once a year after it gets a little gooey inside from all the water dipping and cat hair (this is a non-waterproof beacon example; we have waterproof beacons for outdoor pets). But I recently heard about these silicone holders from a customer (thanks, Luke!) and thought I would give them a try.

After some searching and a few unsuccessful purchases from Amazon, I finally found a good silicone beacon holder that works well on pet collars. It is a tight fit, but it can hold our BC021 beacon. Here’s a pic:

cat color silicone beacon holder
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I paid about $8 for two of them. They are also available in other colors. Here’s the Amazon link:

https://a.co/d/3vZ2Ufi

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That looks like it should be pretty easy to print using a soft TPU filament.

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Just out of interest, what do you do with the ibeacon when they are inside? Just to know where they are?

When my cats go outside, I wear them a cheap gps tracker with sim, so I know the route where they went in HA…

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My usage case is feeder bowls, one for each cat. That way we can control the amount that each cat eats. Also, one of the cats eats a special food diet, so we can prevent the other two from eating her special food.

Other projects that customers have told me about include:

  1. A dog door that allows the dog to go in and out to the backyard, but when the cat is near, the door locks to prevent the cat from getting out.

  2. One guy wanted to know where his cat was located in the house at all times.

  3. Another person wanted to take their dog for a walk and then when they arrived home, something something. Haha, I forget! His story is posted on my website.

If anyone has any interesting “iBeacons and HA” usages cases to share, please email me so I can post them on our website website. If it involves a pet, pictures are highly welcome!

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Ah ok thnx for sharing, what’s also cool is a wifi pet feeder, I have one with 2 bowls, so I can feed the cats with HA… You can also setup a graph to see how many portions were supplied a day, or integrate the camara of the feeder

Or when not home, you can feed the cats :slight_smile:

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Thomas - Thrilled to come across this thread. Sad to say that I was not aware of your iBeacon products, but I will be a (small) customer very soon.

Right now, I have the exact use case you mention here, with one kitty that understands ‘boundaries’ and one kitty that will eat anything edible at any time. I’m very interested in any build details that you might be able to share on your individual kitty bowl/feeders. If I were able to build at least one of those, I know of one kitty that would be very happy.
Thanks in advance!

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Yeah, wifi connection would be cool. I built these bowls 7 years ago when I only knew a bit about coding, plus I used Arduino Pro Minis inside. They didn’t even have BLE in those days, and for sure did not have wifi. If I have to build them all over again, I would use ESP32s with built-in BLE and Wifi.

Sadly, I am too lazy to rebuild them! :laughing:

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Hi Terry,

So your situation is similar to how ours started. We had one cat that would vacuum up all food in sight, so we have to prevent her from doing that. We only had two cats at first, then added a third later. The third one also has a habit of eating others’ food from time to time. One cat is an angel and ONLY eats his own food (he’s the one in the video).

Anyways, long story short, I spent a ton of time learning to code on the Arduino IDE. (Shouldn’t have majored in Chinese in college!). For the brains, I used an Arduino Pro Mini, then attached an HM-10 BLE module to do the beacon scanning. The other key part is the motor, which is a stepper motor, which is easy to find. The unique thing about it is that it has metal gears inside the motor. I tried regular cheap stepper motors but their plastic gears would always get easily stripped, probably because my door opening mechanism is a bit janky.

Re the door opening: This actually was one of the most challenging issues. To make a door slide sideways is not as easy as it seems at first. There are some expensive solutions (fancy machined screw drive like they use in 3D printers), but I wanted something cheap and tough since I was thinking about selling these as a consumer product eventually. (In the end, the idea of providing tech support to crazy cat owners scared me away from this idea! lol).

The Arduino code I wrote is really outdated now. I used a very odd way of reading through the scan data; at the time, standard BLE code libraries for Arduino did not exist. Some smart guy in the Arduino forums taught me how to do it this strange way. For you, the good news is there are standard BLE scan libraries now, and each library comes with a set of example sketches. All you need to do it use one of those and then modify it to fit your usage case.

I would suggest you use an ESP32 as the brains and Arduino IDE for writing and modifying the code. Once you setup Arduino IDE on your computer, you can download the free ESP32 libraries, and in there you can find several sketch examples for BLE scanning. Use one of those as your base, and make changes to it. This next image shows the Arduino IDE on my computer and I have opened the menu to show the ESP BLE example sketches:

Arudino ESP Code Sample Screenshot
Arudino ESP Code Sample Screenshot1522×2088 222 KB

Here’s a look inside the bowl. Don’t get scared by all the wires; this is way more complicated that it should be. If I rebuilt one today, it would be much simpler than this one looks. Probably the most interesting thing in the pictures is the way the plexiglass cover slides open with a simple mechanism and one simple metal gear stepper motor.

IMG_7641
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IMG_7642
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IMG_7643
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You can see it in action in the video I linked yesterday (see above in this thread).

Hope that gives you some starting ideas!

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I just bought one :+)

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Hi Terry,

I just remembered another issue. The wood box is a bit of a hassle if you don’t have woodworking machinery. But there’s a cheap option that you can try out as well: Plastic shoe boxes. Here’s an Amazon link:

https://a.co/d/dPz2FAy

I started out using one of these plastic boxes when I was not sure the whole idea would work out. The hardest part is cutting the hole in the top. If you use a sharp blade, you can cut it decently, but it will still look a little crappy. Anyways, good enough for proof of concept.

Once you feel confident it will work, you can invest some time in making a wood box. I made mine with cheap cedar fence planks from Home Depot.

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This looks amazing.

Dont wanna hijack the thread, but do you sell your tags in Europe? Just need one for my cat and saw that the shipping is 80 dollars :stuck_out_tongue:

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You can order from our website and get usps shipping to many countries. I think eBay also offers overseas shipping of our products too, but I’m not sure what they charge for shipping.

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Does these actually work in Home assistant? I bought the feasycom one and im struggling to get them to work.

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Hi Cloud,

What do you mean by “these”?

If you are talking about my cat bowls, then no, they do not link with HA in any way.

If you are talking about iBeacons, then yes, they work for sure in HA. Just use the iBeacon Tracker integration.

I have successfully set up test projects using iBeacons 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

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Yeah sorry that was pretty vague, was feeding baby at the same time lol
What Bluetooth adapter are you using?
I want to use these as a way to know when the dogs accidentally get outside the Home Zone.

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Re your “dog gone” project: As I mentioned in the link below, the “away” reaction of the iBeacon Tracker integration is pretty slow. It varies, but can be as long as 2-3 minutes. (I haven’t tested it for a while, so maybe it is better now). That’s kinda slow for something urgent like “hey, the dogs are running down the street!” If it was me, I would want a faster notification.

One option is to try to set up your system so that it triggers your automation when the beacon signal is less than -85, for example. In other words, instead of triggering when the signal is MISSING/“away” (which is slow in this integration), you could instead trigger when the beacon RSSI signal is less than (weaker than) -85. So any dog beacon rssi signal reading below -85, e.g. -87, -91, -94, would trigger the automation. This setup would work if the dog is gradually moving away, and the scanner has time to “see” weak rssi readings. But if the dog was running away, the scanner might see -83 and then one second later the dog might be out of range, so then the “less than -85” would not trigger. I suppose you could set up two automations, one based on the weak signal idea, and another as a backup that would trigger when the beacon was “away”/missing. So if the weak signal automation failed to trigger due to the dog running away fast, then at least the backup “away” automation would trigger a couple minutes later.

Another option: I am working on a new product which will be a beacon scanner/gateway specializing in fast scans and reactions. It won’t be ready though for another month or two. It will be sorta like ESPresence, but coded for fast reactions/automations. It will be limited to scanning for three beacons max. You can place it far away from your HA, as long as the HA and the gateway are on the same wifi network. The bad news for you is that it will be limited to using Blue Charm branded beacons only.

Re bluetooth adaptor: I’m not using any adaptor or proxy. My rPi has built-in BLE scanning ability. Take a look at this link for all the details:

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yeah same im in Australia and the shipping is nuts

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We use the post office for international shipments. They are the cheapest option we have.

You might try eBay to see what they charge for international shipments. I know they they consolidate a bunch of orders together so they might be cheaper for shipping. We sell the BC021 on eBay as well.

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It’s still like 80$ Au just for 1 device… No thanks.

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Has anyone else found these silicone cases anywhere? It looks like the Amazon link now points to an apple airtag case.