Using the BLE transmitter in the Android app

Hello,

I’m looking for clarification on the BLE transmitter function of the companion android application. I have activated it, I have a uuid. I have activated the beacon.
It’s seen by my two olimexes with proxyBLE but I can’t see how to add it to my “person”. Nor is it seen by the ibeacon tracker.
Could someone explain how to do this?

I can see the discovery of bluetooth devices, but no trace of a beacon device. Yet they are well seen by my olimex:
image

image

Dans les logs j’ai que des lignes de ce type :


nothing with a uuid and no mac is that of my phone

I bought this tag and it not seen too:
https://fr.aliexpress.com/item/32826502025.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2fra

Did you ever figure out how to get this working? I’m trying to use an old Nexus 7 as a presence detector.

Non I don’t… I just use wifi and a bleutooth tag…

We are waiting for them to fix it.

The problem is that at some point they decided not to allow empty names for iBeacons, and the Android app is transmitting an empty name. So they are working on adding an allow list to the iBeacon integration to allow you to say I specifically want you to listen for this UUID even if it has an empty name.

Now my ibeacon is seen but there are a lot of :

What it’s wrong in my settings ?

To be clear about what you are saying, are you using the HA app to act as a “virtual beacon”?

If so, there is a well documented thing where the iBeacon Tracker integration will need to “see” the beacon signal from your phone more than ten times (with a different random MAC attached each time) before it will decide that it is a legit beacon broadcast.

Try searching here in the community for posts about this topic. I haven’t been around here recently, so maybe it is already changed, but last I remember, this was always the tricky/confusing part of using a phone to act as a virtual iBeacon.

It is weird that the actual iBeacon you bought on Aliexpress is not working. That one definitely should be picked up by the iBeacon Tracker integration right away. Are you sure the beacon is broadcasting? If you use a free app like LightBlue to scan for it, can you see the beacon on the LightBlue scan screen? That is a very old design beacon that has been around for ten years. There are many many different versions of the firmware, so I can not be sure, but you need to insert the battery then turn the beacon ON. To turn it on, you probably need to hold down that little black button on the PCB for 5 -8 seconds, or something like that. The LED will probably blink differently when it is ON versus turning it OFF.

By the way, what is your goal for this?

Hello,

Thanks for your answer. I use the HA compagnion app. So I ll wait. I ll find the topic about it.

I ll try to use the ibeacon bought on Aliexpress later.

By the way, I happened to be looking for a sample of a similar old beacon yesterday. When I found it, I also found my old handwritten instructions that said you need to hold down the button three seconds to turn the Beacon on.

1 Like