Single iBeacon not enough for home/away?

Mobile Apps Home Assistant Companion for Apple
21

I have the same issue as @jcastro above - does anyone have this working? Beacons triggering an enter Zone with the native IOS app Beacon support? (not using Owntracks)
I just want it to turn on a light or open a gate when a Beacon is detected (Beacon detection sets Zone to frontgate, trigger the gate latch for example)
It is not well documented - nothing under Zone and limited explanation under Location. No matter what I try I can’t get it to work as it should.
Does anyone have the definitive setup that they can share? Settings for Zone, Customize etc
I’ve been struggling with confusion around this for weeks now.
Thanks

22

I have it working.

I have 5 RadBeacon USB iBeacons in my home; with one in garage and then spread to give good coverage. They are all set to the same UUID, minor and major.

5 was required so I can walk to anyplace in my home and it still sees the beacons; as well as in backyard. Perhaps higher power ones would work less. I chose the radbeacons as they plug into a powered USB port and don’t need batteries. I use a couple old Apple 5W chargers to host them around the house.

In HA config customize.yaml for the home zone I define the same UUID, minor and major.

Then go into config in the iOS app and re-save the settings. under your home zone it should now show the beacon uuid, minor and major.

It now should work.

Note the current iOS app release has a bug in it’s notifications, both a zone enter and exit due to ibeacon will be notified as a exit event. This was a bug that should be fixed in the next version (code is fixed but build not released yet).

23

BT on the RPI is broken and if enabled will cause issues with the wifi. If you want to use the BT you need to disable the wifi completely.

Then their is an issue in the HA code for the BT and BT LE trackers in that the way they work are CPU hogs. Search on here and you will find a lot of info about this. It’s also the same on my NUC. So I’ve just disabled the BT tracker and use what I’ve mentioned in this thread to make it work.

24

I got it working with your directions thanks, but now it uses both GPS and iBeacons, which is confusing. Is there any way to only use iBeacons for a zone instead of both?

25

In the iOS app I think you can turn off gps updates

26

How do you turn off gps updates??

27

In the location settings of the app turn off significant motion updates.

28

Won’t that turn off all GPS updates for all zones? I just want to use beacons in one zone, home.

29

So, if you have beacons in the house, what are you using to detect the beacons?

30

iOS app and OwnTracks.

31

Unfortunately it is all or nothing right now.

32

Yah, I realized that after I send the previous reply lol. Thanks, I’m going to be doing this same thing.

Do you find iOS app to be better than OwnTracks for the iPhone?

33

I’m comparing them right now and using the iOS app with just OT to compare results. They seem about the same. OT has some nice extra features,

34

@jwelter - If you don’t mind… How are you getting this (iBeacons) to work with the ios app?

I have this in my configuration.yaml:

zone:
  name: Home
  latitude: !secret lat
  longitude: !secret lon
  radius: 100

then in customize.yaml:

 zone.home:
   track_ios: false
   beacon:
     uuid: 74278bda-b6444520-8f0c720e-af059935
     major: 2
     minor: 1080

If I remove the track_ios: false the iOS app crashes when I hit Save. If I leave it, then I don’t get any updates… am I missing something key?

35

Zone is setup like you show.

This is my customize config:

zone.home:
  beacon:
    uuid: XXXXXX
    major: 1
    minor: 0
zone.Q3:
  beacon:
    uuid: YYYYYYY
    major: 0
    minor: 0
1 Like
36

thanks… One more question. In your iOS app, if you go to Settings->Location Settings at the bottom of that screen, are you two zones shown with Location/radius/beacon info? If not, if you go back to the main settings screen and hit save, do they appear?

I have the suspicion that the ios app has a bug where it’s not loading the zone info properly from HA or It loses it in some cases (doesn’t appear until you hit save), and in my case at least, it crashes when trying to load

37

Yes they both show with beacon, radius, and location in the two zones with beacons.

I’ve never had the iOS app crash and been running it since the start.

38

Sometimes a single tracker isn’t reliable enough. I use multiple home trackers including nmap, geofency (ios), owntracks (ios), home assistant (ios app) and ibeacons (owntracks, geofency and ha app all use geolocation and ibeacons together). The reliablility went from erratic while using single trackers to 100% now. I have combined all these trackers to a single bayesian presence sensor with probabilities from this great blog: https://diyfuturism.com/index.php/2017/11/26/presence-detection-with-home-assistant-bayesian-probability/

39

For anyone following this thread… check to make sure your UUIDs are in the format:

########-####-####-####-############ which doesn’t seems to be the default style that some beacons come with, but it is the default from the uuidgen command.

See my post here:

1 Like
40

HappyBubbles is quite expensive :frowning:

Anyone knows a cheaper option?