I installed the new ibeacon integration ehrn it was released. To test it I bought a bluecharm long range usb device. It sort of works but even if it is continuously powered, all the sensors from the device become unavailable after a home assistant restart. Moving the device around does not help I need to remove and repower the device before it begins working. My question is: is this a characteristic of ibeacon devices or a current limitation of the ibeacon integration. If it’s the device then ibeacons are essentially worthless in my opinion, otherwise maybe I just need to be patient.
I can’t quite follow what you are describing. If you bought a USB-powered iBeacon, it should be plugged into USB power and therefore won’t move around. So what are you moving when you are “moving the device”?
When you say “all the sensors from the device become unavailable after a home assistant restart”, what do you mean by sensors? A USB-powered iBeacon does not have sensors.
Maybe you are mistakenly thinking that the USB-powered iBeacon is a BLE proxy and will scan for other things? If so, that’s not correct. There are USB-powered BLE scanners that can be set up as BLE Proxies in HA, but a USB-powered iBeacon is not a scanner. It is a broadcaster.
What are you trying to accomplish with the iBeacon? Typically, the usage case is a moveable iBeacon attached to a human or pet or car or trash car or mailbox or drawer or whatever. When the iBeacon comes in range of the scanner (the HA iBeacon Tracker integration or ESPresence/Home that is watching/scanning for that particular iBeacon), an automation is triggered (e.g. message on your phone saying “the mail has been delivered!”)
USB-powered iBeacons can be installed in a car and powered by the car’s USB outlet when the car is turned on. You can do some cool things using that setup too.
Another use of fixed location USB-powered iBeacons is your phone could scan for that particular beacon (installed in your bedroom) and then when the phone sees the iBeacon in range, it will know you are in your bedroom and then it could shut off the house lights or something like that (using an app like MacroDroid or PushCut or whatever).
I’m seeing someting similar to what Bruce is seeing with the ibeacon Integration and two brand new BlueCharm waterproof BLE 5.0 devices. After turning them on and enabling trigger on button and motion (only changes) I disconencted from the puck and it was almost instantly picked up by HA.
And then went dark. And unavailable.
Then it came back - and now I have two… The new one has different entity IDs
Then three And four.
Everytime the device comes back online I see another instance. It’s impossible to setup an automation because it keeps instantiating new devices. I do not know if this is new in 10.2 as this is the first time I’ve setup the integration.
I tried with a second device and it’s doing the same thing.
Looks like a bug in the iBeacon tracker integration. Maybe try temporarily turning off the iBeaconTracker/three-dot-menu/System-Options/automatically-enable-newly-added-entities until they work out the bug.
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agreed - although I don’t see a matching bug report here:
Issues · home-assistant/core (github.com)
@bturrie May want to submit a bug report - if you don’t I will when I get home from work.
Sorry for the confusion. My ibeacon creates 4 sensors in HA. They all go unavailable if I reboot HA. During the test I had it my usb beacon plugged into a 10000 mAh batttery so it was powered during the reboot but not moving. The only way to bring the sensors back from unavailable was to unplug it from the battery and then plug it back in, Later ran another test. I plugged the ibeacon it into a usb socket in my car at which point the distance sensor read 11meters. Then I drove to the grocery store a few miles away and the (supposedly long range ibeacon) never read more than 14 meters away from my home HA system the entire trip.
14 meters from the USB beacon (which has a shorter range than other beacons due to its very small size and small antenna) is pretty good actually.
Don’t forget you have a giant metal and glass box wrapped around the beacon (your car). Also depends on the sensitivity of the scanner.
Re the disappearing device (not sensor) issue: that sounds the same as Bruce Nathan mentioned in his comment. Whenever in doubt about the beacon, scan for it on the scan screen of our KBeacon app. Be sure to turn on the scan (upper right corner of the app page) and be sure to periodically refresh the scan by swiping your finger down the screen. If you see your beacon there, it’s working.
I filed a bug report. No diagnostics or log data to provide but hopefully enough to be helpful. Turns out the ibeacon BC-UC! I bought wasn’t in the known working list maybe that’s the issue. I have a couple more coming soon so I can repeat the tests.
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The BC-U1 has the same firmware etc as the BC011, BC021, and BC08. The only difference will be in the range due to the form factor. These other beacons have some features like motion trigger or button trigger, but these are just options that won’t influence the basic function.
Are you expecting the BLE long range ibeacon to work from “a few miles away”?
How much are you expecting from that?
not really, but 14 meters seems pretty short to be consider “long rrange” other tiny devices from the same manufacturer advertise up to 90 meters which is okay.
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90 meters is theoretical range based on line of sight for the regular sized beacons: no walls, no metal, no glass, no humans, no obstructions of any kind.
The small USB version beacon has a theoretical range of 60 meters. So the Tiny USB version (internal antenna is less than half the size of the other beacon antennas) getting 14 meters range from inside a car is pretty good. If you are driving away, it might have also missed a few readings at the end due to the speed of the car moving away. So maybe actually 15-20 meters from inside a car.
Ideas:
I wonder if you could install an external antenna on your HA hardware?
Another idea is to increase the TX power of the beacon from 0 to +4.
I’ve returned the USB sensor in part because of the range but also because there was no way to detect “home” versus “away”. My other ibeacon a BC011 has a 90 meter range but isn’t much better. It still never goes above about 15 meters. When I go any farther it just stops updating. Then its binary sensor still shows as “home”. The integration never shows “away” or “unavailable” in that case. As it is, the example automations shown with the ibeacon Integration Docs will never run…
Has anyone had a problem with two identical devices being found the integration.
Ive tried deleting one and deleting the integration but it just discovers two devices again.
Feasycom FSC-BP103B
@Nicko1 Yeah, I see exactly this same issue with 2/3 of my useful iBeacon devices – a BlueCharm key fob, and a Tesla Model 3. The original one (which I adopted, renamed, etc.) does seem to still be functioning as expected, but it has this duplicate one alongside it. Interestingly the duplicate one shows a distance of 1,312 ft that never changes while the original shows an actual believable distance.
I’m curious if others have found a way to deal with the noise caused by lots of different devices being discovered here. I live in a suburban area where neighbors and transients (i.e. Amazon, UPS, etc.) presumably have their own devices that register for short periods of time. This causes a lot of devices I don’t care about being discovered alongside my 3 devices I do care about – 2 BlueCharm key fobs, and a Tesla Model 3. And, what makes it worse is that I use the default dashboard which automatically surfaces Sensor entries on the home page card – almost all of which are Unavailable having only been seen once.
To combat this, I tried using the system options on the integration to disable newly added devices. Unfortunately this seemed to break the integration because after a week or so I lose the 3 devices I am trying to keep. I suspect when this switch is off, it causes the device rotation logic in the integration to not work, and eventually the last known version of my 3 devices go away.
@duerrd561 looks like i found something that could help you out if your using ESPhome to detect your Beacons.
Once you know the MAC address of the beacon you can create a binary_sensor in your esphome config.
