First of all. Thanks @andrewjfreyer for all your effort and selflessly sharing it with us.
That said, I bought a Pi and got it running but apparently monitor can’t “auto detect” either of the known devices. I ended up setting monitor with the -r parameter and although it sometimes takes a quite a while to detect, it works.
How can I fix or improve this? I read the entire topic and saw someone saying something similar about his/her devices not broadcasting anything but ultimately found no solution other than setting up an app emulating a beacon which IMO kinda defeats the purpose of using monitor. Also read about triggers but at the moment I can’t use any ( will definitely work on that as it seems to be the ultimate fix ) but I’m curious why my devices aren’t working as the yours.
I was wondering, living in a 2 story house, how would I go about interference between each node? E.g. Kitchen on ground floor and Living room above on the first floor?
Ideally would like to set up one in each room and can imagine it’ll cause tripping each one … Is there anyway to ‘power down’ the BT radio power for example or limiting the range?
If I strategically place and could potential direct the BT signal in a certain direction, I’d only need 0.5-1 meter range
What are your known devices? Note that the -r parameter has been removed from beta. If you want periodic ping, the presence project is much more appropriate.
Two android phones running Android 7 and Android 8. And I’m using -r as a workaround until I (or you guys) figure this out. Or I’ll move to using triggers, so I’d like to stick with monitor as the ultimate solution.
Have you been able to test that the Android phones actually broadcast bluetooth advertisements? I wrote on this earlier in the thread, but basically this:
Turn bluetooth off on the phones.
First ssh session:
sudo hcitool -lescan
Second ssh session:
sudo hcidump -a
You may see several advertisements in the second ssh window. Turn on bluetooth on your devices and you should nearly immediately see a new “random” advertisement. Turn bluetooth off, wait a moment, and try again. Hopefully you’ll see another different bluetooth advertisement when you turn bluetooth on again.
If you don’t see any advertisements, the phones may not be advertising at all.
Yup, I changed it to once a day (at night) because I thought it was causing false triggers but I found a different bug so I change it back to restart every six hours.
Well. No luck, tried with three different Androids (LG G5, OnePlus 3, Sony XA1 Plus) and none of them sent a packet no matter how many times I turned BT off and on. So am I out of luck?
My girlfriend just changed from an iphone 6s to a iphone XR and the new phone is not detected.
it does not also return a value when I do a name request : hcitool name (MAC)
As others have mentioned, try pairing with another Bluetooth device first. It appears that iPhones do not enable the Bluetooth radio fully unless and until they have been paired with something else
Perhaps the real issue is that these devices need to pair to a Bluetooth LE device, instead of a generic Bluetooth device. To conform to the Bluetooth protocol they will have to advertise.