Successfully tracking tile's with Happy Bubbles

In search for a good BLE device i tried a few things out there including XYZ+, TrackR, and MYNT. They each had their problems ranging from too big, battery life, or poor range. On the other hand, tile checks off on all those boxes. After some fiddling I was finally able to track the tile devices by first pairing with my iPhone through the app and then either deleting the app or disabling background refresh for the app. This makes the tile devices continue to broadcast openly unpaired. There you can easily integrate into your Happy Bubbles presence server. Hope this helps someone looking for a similar solution.

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I just ordered a Happy Bubbles BLE receiver and a BLE transmitter to test out. I’ll be referencing this again for the Tile Info… thanks!

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@jeubanks Ive tried a dozen of BLE transmitters and tile is the only one that has not dropped once in the past few days of tracking it. You’ll notice with other transmitters they are very unreliable. The use of those lead me to even add an input_boolean for redundancy. Since my automation were kicking off when a transmitter drops for a few moments. good luck let me know how it goes

@Andrew_Lozoya, If you don’t mind sharing what receiver are you using for collecting the BLE pings? I’m hoping the Happy Bubbles works well, but if not suggestions are always welcome.

I avoided this for performance concerns… plus the happy bubbles will allow you to use multiple receivers (different rooms)

how can you make Happy Bubbles effective ? On my configuration, the BLE device changes location each many seconds from one piece to the closest one.

So, I can’t do indoor location with HA and all possible automation rules linked to indoor position. :frowning:

You probably need an iBeacon they are much better at distance reporting. Try the XY4+ additionally you could up the confidence setting on the happy bubbles server.

Hi Andrew,

I was looking for this! (because the Tiles component doesn’t update often enough to be reliable for location tracking). Disabled background tracking now, curious to test out tonight :slight_smile: