Also can I use it some way to trigger lights in a room? As in is it responsive enough for real-life usage?
I dont know what is the best but got a cheap one from aliexpress (~7$ round white) and it works great ( use the keys+phone with a min_max sensor on confidence - my phone sometimes disconnects when in bedroom on the far side of the house but keys are always detected in the ālanding padā).
Ordered some other cheap ones (one that looks like a tile tracker for 4$ and some really cheap ones at 1.5$ with a button o.O ) just to test so will update the thread when they come.
Using the beta branch too btw.
try beta branch
Thanks. Do they have a decent battery life?
i hope that at least a year - i use it for 2 months now so i can report back in a year or when it dies 
Here is a handy application note for the beacon (CC2541) that calculates the expected lifetime to 400 days:
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra347a/swra347a.pdf
link to the beacon (wont win any style awards tho) : https://www.aliexpress.com/item/CC2640-1-8V-3-8V-Bluetooth-BLE-4-1-Wireless-Module-For-DOTT-iBeacon-Base-Station/32846400403.html?spm=a2g0s.13010208.99999999.339.45183c00VCB6Kj
EDIT to clarify - the calculation is for cc2541 but i use cc2640 that is suppose to be much more energy efficient.
Cool. Good to know. Will start getting the stuff I need.
p.s. What range do you get out of these things?
to be honest - no idea - didnāt measure it.
Keys are usually ~7m from the bt dongle used for scans. max i used is 10m with 1 wall.
Can you actually program them somehow that they only trigger if theyāre really close to the Pi zero?
I mean kind of want to use it for a door unlock within the house.
Range of maybe just 0.5-1m?
In Monitor, Is there a way I can get rssi/distance of iPhones as well in order to use only in very close proximity?
Thanks.
No, iPhones do not broadcast RSSI without connecting to them, which slows down detection for multi-device homes and single-device homes alike.
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Agreed the room-assistant might be better for @forums2012, but note that it does not have the ability to detect phones. Thatās one of the main reasons I wrote this project in the first place.
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@andrewjfreyer Does the beta version work better on pi zeros? Iām having the high load issue, but weird enough only on one of my pis.
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Thanks a lot for the info.
Loving it so far.
However kind of trying to figure out what all cool things I can do with it?
@andrewjfreyer, do you see any reason why a combination of Monitor (for phones) and Room Assistant (for ibeacons/BLE beacons) wouldnāt fly ? Even though Iām very happy with Monitor (thanks!) in regards of phones, itās still giving me quite some headache on beacons.
I can confirm the high load issue in a raspberry pi3 using the beta branch. After 4-5 hours running monitor.sh goes to 100% CPU load consistently:
top - 09:09:15 up 19 days, 17:30, 4 users, load average: 1.02, 1.14, 1.31
Tasks: 180 total, 2 running, 175 sleeping, 0 stopped, 3 zombie
%Cpu(s): 25.5 us, 0.2 sy, 0.0 ni, 74.4 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 947732 total, 97336 free, 446472 used, 403924 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 102396 total, 0 free, 102396 used. 412056 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4306 root 20 0 5304 2736 1948 R 100.0 0.3 365:22.43 bash
13871 pi 20 0 8248 3224 2660 R 1.0 0.3 0:00.22 top
monitor pids:
pi@raspberrypi3:~ $ ps aux | grep monitor
root 4220 0.0 0.3 7164 3276 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:00 sudo bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4224 0.0 0.3 5396 3216 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:35 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4304 0.0 0.2 5032 2176 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:01 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4305 0.0 0.2 5032 2188 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:07 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4306 35.0 0.2 5304 2736 pts/3 R+ Nov19 372:41 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4308 0.0 0.2 5032 2252 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:00 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4309 0.0 0.2 5032 2252 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:01 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 4317 0.0 0.2 5032 1936 pts/3 S+ Nov19 0:00 bash monitor.sh -td -R
root 14116 0.0 0.1 5032 1688 pts/3 S+ 09:16 0:00 bash monitor.sh -td -R
I canāt seem to find anything in the logs that hint to a problem. For instance, started monitor late evening and this morning was 100% again but the logs didāt show anything unusual:
....
0.1.732 09:45:19 PM [CMD-INFO] **** Completed departure scan. ****
0.1.732 11:18:49 PM [CHECK-DEL] PUBL/BEAC [REDACTED]:67 expired after 109 seconds
0.1.732 11:54:24 PM [CHECK-DEL] PUBL/BEAC [REDACTED]:4D expired after 108 seconds
0.1.732 03:05:46 AM [CHECK-DEL] PUBL/BEAC [REDACTED]:46 expired after 96 seconds
0.1.732 08:33:53 AM [INSTRUCT] mqtt trigger arrive
....
Let me know if I can do anything to help test this further.
So my hack is just to restart it. Not ideal but hopefully it keeps it operational until a fix is available.
$ sudo crontab - e
Add this at the bottom. Restarting every hour might be overkill but I see no harm
55 * * * * systemctl restart monitor.service
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Thanks @ryanrdetzel, I will do something similar to my crontab. I was reluctant as I didnāt know what would happen if a restart was done in the middle of an arrival or departure scanā¦
If you donāt experience much problems I would prefer to add it to crontab rather than having my pi at 100% all the time.
You could have it restart when you think nobody is home or at night. I think worst case though it runs when it boots so it would still detect just a little delayed, if at all.
That sounds awesome. Would this also affect Known iPhones as well?
That way we could essentially decrease the range of a pi zero?