Hi Folks, just signed up as I discovered HASS a few days ago and have been going nuts with HA Even went out and bought a bunch of Hue lights and such things, having a great time with this software getting my life automated!
I’ve run into a problem I can’t seem to figure out with my configuration regarding BLE Tiles. My wife has a tile on her keychain and I have one on mine. I had originally set them up as two different accounts (with tile.com) but I can’t figure out (if possible) to have two accounts monitored by HASS:
device_tracker:
platform: tile
username: me
password: password
platform: tile
username: wife
password: password
This didn’t work, got a python error in the logs. What I ended up doing was transferring the tile from my wifes account to mine and only my account is specified. Doesn’t quite fit into the model we’re planning to use it for. Is there a way to have two tile.com accounts monitored in HASS? It works fine otherwise using a “home” zone but the functionality of the tile is reduced as my wife’s tile will ring my phone instead of hers.
For those who might be interested – I ended up moving all devices/tiles to one account. It works but only as a solution to the HASS side of things. I would have preferred to be able to support multiple tile.com accounts so that my wife and I could maintain our own collection of tiles/devices.
I suppose now I need to buy some happy bubbles to try to use them in beacon mode instead or use some other method for presence detection method I haven’t explored yet.
Thanks! I’ll give this a try. I assume it won’t work if the tiles are already paired to a phone? I did some reading in the forum here and seems if the app is installed/tile paired, this method won’t work? We do like the idea of having the functionality of the tile but I’d be willing to accept it just being a wireless tag (of sorts) if I can get your method working.
Did a MAC lookup, one is my Samsung TV … not sure if the others are the tiles or not. Guess I’ll need to shutdown the app(s) on both phones and see if I can see the tiles via BT from them to isolate them. In your example you noted you’re running Hassbian (which I assume is the port 5000 endpoint) so I’ll need to find another way to get this data inserted into HASS but it looks promising
Yeah, I’d say the phone apps are still reserving access to the Tiles.
They should appear twice per device on that list, one with ‘Unknown’ and the other with ‘Tile’. You’ll know you can use my little script once you see ‘Tile’ appear.
The port 5000 endpoint is for my little api script, not hassbian. So as long as you can get the python script running in your venv install, you should be fine.
I imagine you’ll have to change the IP in the sensor snippets to http://127.0.0.1:5000 if the bluetooth detection is on the same device as the script’s running on.
I’ve had all of my devices in one Tile account from the start, but the result is that it doesn’t always show the correct location of both phones. Are you seeing the same issue?
It does update the location but it’s not real-time and definitely time-delayed. My original idea behind the Tile was for presence detection since BT/WiFi is not super reliable on modern smartphones (iPhone7/Zenfone3) due to sleep/power-saving mode. The other deficiency to Tile is that it’ll pair to the nearest/strongest device so if my wife and I are in the same room and my BT connection is slightly stronger (for whatever reason) and I do a key/phone locate, it’ll use the strongest device.
This is why I’d rather use them as beacon (of sorts) for presence detection as “standard” operation of the system doesn’t really jive with what I want.
The reason I wanted to originally track two tile accounts was because each tile reports GPS location (via phone) which I figured be a good presence detection for “home” and “not_home” based on the coordinates of my home zone configuration.
EDIT: As far as HASS is concerned, the GPS location is always “home” when in range even though via debug I can see it reporting different location. Ultimately, a beacon use-case would be a lot useful to me for HASS and I’m now working on getting that up and running to see how accurate/responsive it’ll be.
OK, got everything cobbled together here and it’s working. There’s about a 30-40 second gap every so often (as you noted in the in the other thread) but fortunately the automation routines have a bigger gap to determine if someone is here/away. Definitely more reliable than tracking WiFi or BT.
Even went out and bought a bunch of Hue lights and such things, having a great time with this software getting my life automated!