Hi,
I installed 2022.10.1 and now my Home Assistant finds an iBeacon Tracker. The problem is I don’t know what this device is. How can I figure it out? The source below is my Raspberry Pi hosting Home Assistant.
Sc041588927456aafC 33FE
Source type: bluetooth_le
Uuid: 74278bda-b644-4520-8f0c-720eaf059935
Major: 0
Minor: 41,757
Source: DC:A6:32:8F:38:B0
I’ve had the same experience. That tells me that at least there is not an unidentified tracker somewhere in my house.
Anyone know what it is specifically?
Of course obligatory documentation for iBeacon tracker: iBeacon Tracker - Home Assistant
Firstly, to clarify some terminology, what you are seeing is a BLE device of some type. It could be an Apple AirTag (which is a tracker) or Tile (sorta like a tracker) or an iBeacon (not a tracker) or any other BLE device such as headphones or whatever (not trackers).
The new integration recently added to HA is called “iBeacon Tracker”. It can be used for triggering automations based on iBeacon proximity. So the HA is tracking the iBeacon; the iBeacon is not tracking anything.
Back to your issue: try to download a free app called LightBlue onto your phone. Be sure Bluetooth is turned on, then open the app and use it to scan for BLE items. See if you can find the same item on that screen. The name will be the same name as shown in your post. Once you find it, take a look at the signal strength shown on the app screen. It will be a negative number like -79 or whatever. Try walking around with your phone to see how that number changes. It will get higher as you get closer and closer to the mystery BLE item. Higher means closer to zero, so for example, -45 is higher than -79. Once you get really close to the mystery item, you can figure out what it is.
As far as I know, I don’t have any AirTag, Tiles or anything like that. I do have plenty of Apple devices, such as Airpods, iPhones, iPad, Apple Watches. My assumption is that 1 of these is acting as the iBeacon, but not sure why just 1. Of course, that’s just my best guess right now.
It doesn’t have to be a beacon to show up on the list. Anything BLE will show up. When I set mine up, of course I had hundreds of beacons on the list, but I also had WiFi lights (that you configure with BLE) and several other random things. I think my iMac showed up also.
Hi, I have a similar problem.
I am using ODROID with Bluetooth ASUS USB-BT400
I installed the integration but it doesn’t show me any devices. Yes, phones, headphones, watches, just nothing, neither Apple nor Samsung. :-/
I have Bluetooth installed, iBeacon Tracker, in config.yaml Bluetooth:, restarted several times, turn BT on/off immediately at HA.
Any advice?
Interesting, I’ve also lots of Apple gear, including AirTags…
After being notified an iBeacon had been detected and reading this thread I decided to add it anyway to see what the device might be and to see what other devices might get added…
Turns out the name of the device detected was my Ikea Standing Desk Bluetooth controller, so that’s unexpected as it shouldn’t be any sort of BT Tracker or Beacon, so I’ll wait to see if this gets removed or not based on the integration docs…
I’m new to HA so I might not be following exactly what you are doing, but here’s some ideas anyways:
So it sounds like you are using ODROID as the HA hardware (instead of an rPi), and you have plugged in the ASUS thing as the BLE scanner. Is that correct?
Re the ASUS thing: I think that is a regular dongle that you would use to connect a BLE keyboard or headphones. So I don’t think it will act as a BLE scanner. You might look for something that is clearly a BLE scanner. Something like this maybe:
DSD TECH SH-A11 Bluetooth USB Eddystone and iBeacon Dongle with Google Proximity Technology Amazon.com
I’m not 100% sure that product will do what you want, so please research further before buying one.
I don’t think your BLE desk will get removed automatically. I think you need to find it on the device list and disable it. You can probably delete it somehow, but I’m not sure how to do that.
I’m guessing that the devs set up this integration as user-friendly as possible, so they decided to have all BLE devices nearby automatically populate into the device list. Then you can decide which is your target iBeacon or smartphone device for triggering automations.
There’s also an option in the three dot menu to the integration to turn off the automatically add feature. But it’s better to leave it as is (at least for now), since many users will try to use the HA app on their Android phones as a virtual beacon (not the greatest idea, but we can leave that for another day). Since the Android has randomized MACs, the integration needs to keep auto adding each of the single Android’s MACs until it collects ten of them; then it will conclude that it is just one phone with randomized MACs and then stop adding each new MAC associated with that particular phone.
it normally works for me with BLE sensors like thermometers, etc., so I assume it might work with this as well. The original bluetooth tracker worked to detect ok.
Same here. Where did you find the information like the Uuid and other information? I just have the Integration showing up in the Integration screen with no information tied to it like entities or anything.
dj
Does your HA have built-in Bluetooth hardware? If not, have you connected some other hardware to scan for beacons?
The iBeacon Tracker integration is just software; it still needs hardware to scan for beacons. My rPi has built-in Bluetooth hardware, so the integration worked fine for me. Now I just need to try to add some BLE proxy hardware around the house in order to reach/scan locations further from my rPi. At least that’s my limited understanding.
I would have to double check but I assume it does have Bluetooth built in. When I upgraded to the build that added Bluetooth, my son’s LED strip showed up as a new device. I didn’t manually add the ibeacon. HA said it had detected a new device and it was ibeacon. In just trying to get an idea on what it might be.
dj
Ok, if it already found something then clearly your HA has Bluetooth hardware built in. You can use a scanner app such as Beacon Scope by David Young (Android only) to scan for the beacon, and see it’s signal strength. Then it’s like a kid’s game of warmer/colder to move around your house to find the beacon. As you get closer to it, the signal strength will increase. A weak signal is something like -85. As it gets strong, it will get higher, i.e. closer to zero. So -25 will be inches from the beacon.
If you don’t have an Android, you can use another free app called LightBlue in the same way. But it won’t show you the broadcast uuid and major and minor like David Young’s app does.
The same iBeacon Tracker appeared a few versions earlier! With @BlueCharmBeacons ’ suggested App, LightBlue on iOS, I was able to easily determine that this iBeacon Tracker was actually my car (Tesla M3)!
That’s going to be a really inconvenient beacon to attach to your keychain! 
I installed Light blue and it sees close to 15 devices.
What is not clear for me are the dependencies between the different integrations. I have some Switchbot Devices added via the Switchbot Integration. Then a iBeacon Tracker was added through Home Assistant. Its my Nuki Bridge. Next i see all my Switchbot devices also in BTHome integration plus other devices.
Should i add also my Swicthbot Devices as BTHome devices?
Is there a dependency between iBeacon Tacker and BTHome?
I need some help. iBeacon Tracker yesterday detected and automatically added a device with some UUID to my HA but I’m not sure which device it is. BLE proxy scanner was setup via ESPHome M5Stack Atom to track my Amazfit watch presence. Unfortunately this new device has switched my HA presence to status “Home” when I’m away and HA alarm also switched to “Armed-Home” mode.
The device UUID is not in known_devices.yaml file and bluetooth_le_tracker in configuration.yaml contains track_new_devices: false. How do I block this new device from the presence tracker?
Thank you in advance for help
P.S. Have found out how prevent adding new device automatically in iBeacon HA integration setup.
But still would be useful to disable iBeacon devices in presence BLE tracker (for trashcan etc.)
Another query along the same lines about iBeacon setup.
So I have 3 ESP32’s that I had ESPresense running on, but wanted to refresh to ESPHome. I’ve done this on one of the ESP32’s and enabled the BLE tracking and Bluetooth proxy. I also added bluetooth: to the HA configuration.yaml. HA has picked the ESPHome device up as well as an iBeacon integration component, but I don’t see any BLE devices anywhere as yet.
So will this work without a dedicated Bluetooth device? does the Bluetooth proxy only work if there is a base station proxy? If so, I will likely have to revert to ESPresence for now which doesn’t have a need for this.