Understanding BLE / iBeacon - is this for my use case?

ESPHome
1

Hi, I am thinking of using Bluetooth to detect unknown people (by their mobiles): for example to activate a camera recording when an unknown bluetooth device shows up and someone’s activating the fingerprint scanner on our main entrance door - just as an example.
The ESPHome integration has modules for iBeacon / BLE - I am wondering if those would be a feasible solution to reach my goal? I understand that in the end it’s more than just detecting the unknown devices, but I would like to understand if beside working with known Bluetooth MACs also detecting unknown MACs would work. Maybe it’s enough for the beginning to just log them somewhere.

I am using Homeassistant since a few weeks and still trying to find my way around, so are there maybe people smarter than me doing this already?

thanks for your thoughts!
André

2

I know of two possible solutions for your “MAC search”. :slight_smile:

One is the mentioned way over ESPHome. the ble_scanner in ESPHome is quite good, it reacts fast to very fast on new BT signals (known or unknown), and the MACs are readable, at least in the logs.

The other would be monitor.sh that runs on a Pi or something similar (=Linux based system as opposed to ESP) and reads BLE advertisements as well. It is not that fast as the ESPHome variant, but usable as well. :slight_smile:

What you do afterwards with these signals/MACs is something different. But it should be doable with some kind of automation that triggers on a new address and reacts on it.

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wow, that was quick! And it works already - thank you so much!

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