Anyone experimenting with Beacons or Eddystone?

wkearney99

wkearney99

Senior Member
Came across some Beacon units an Amazon.  A bit of stfw indicated a competing effort from google (Eddystone).
 
Anyone been fiddling with Beacons for HA?
 
I've been thinking about what to put in our cars to facilitate some awareness logic for automation.  Phone geo-fencing alone is not what I'd consider effective.  At least not as a sole source for proximity-oriented logic.  The Bluetooth Low Energy stuff seems to be gaining traction.  
 
I looked into RFID for this but didn't find much that wouldn't end up being more of a hack than it was worth.  If I've learned anything over the years, it's not to overcomplicate things.  The fewer the pieces, the higher the WAF.  
 
Here have been playing with the active rfid stuff just for the automobiles. 
 
I am at 1/4-1/2 mile range now with some simple adjustments (antennas). 
 
Only mode has been adding an SMA connector the transmitter and a real antenna. (not really a hack at all).
 
Sparkman1 said:
Been looking at the AprilBeacon's but have not bought any yet: http://stores.ebay.com/HelloIBeacons.  Was planning to use them for the same purpose as what you are looking to do and use their receiver that supports MQTT.  Part of the reason I haven't pulled the trigger yet is that I started using GeoFency and it's been very reliable for geo-fencing.
Click to expand...
 
I don't want geo-fencing only via a phone or tablet.  There's plenty of times where the devices aren't leaving, or they've gone offline (which makes them seem like they've left).  That and we have upwards of a dozen such devices, not all of which would be leaving with us each time.  Yes, there's a high likelihood at least some subset of them departing (actually moving away) would be relevant, but not often enough to avoid annoying us.  So I'm leaning toward a more layered collection of indicators/rules.
 
Anyway, I tried your ebay link and it failed.  Did you mean this 'store':
http://stores.ebay.com/HelloIBeacons?_trksid=p2047675.l2563
 
I take their receiver is a BLE to Wi-Fi gateway that can be configured to work with any MQTT broker?  That'd be clever.
 
I've been leaning toward lashing up a Pi3 to act in that capacity.  That is, scan for beacons and pass their presence along accordingly.  But I'm not adverse to buying an inexpensive gizmo like that to do the same thing.  Especially since it's already 'done' and at a price less than what a pi3 setup would cost.
 
That's it.  Fixed the link in my post.  The link to the receiver is working and yes, it is BLE to WiFi and supports MQTT using your own broker.  
 
As an FYI, with GeoFency, if the phone goes off line, it does not appear like it left.  It needs to cross the geofence while active to trigger a change.
 
Cheers
Al
 
OK, I've ordered one of their bridges and two styles of their beacons.  I'll report back once the slow boat from China gets 'em here.
 
wkearney99 said:
OK, I've ordered one of their bridges and two styles of their beacons.  I'll report back once the slow boat from China gets 'em here.
Click to expand...
Great, looking forward to seeing the results.  Which specific beacons did you order?
 
Cheers
Al
 
I am planning on putting something in our two cars.  What, remains to be seen.  I'm going to experiment to see which of those work effectively given where I'd likely want to place the receiver in relation to the driveway.   
 
My interest here is to start building patterns of activity.  Overlay presence, departure and arrival of devices with timestamps and calendars.  Using that to build logic for handling automation.  Nothing revolutionary here, just looking to do more than what most simple rule & schedule based systems attempt to accomplish.
 
I've got a few beacons I played with a while back using the iPhone detection.  I recall you are not iPhone friendly, but it is pretty easy to do on that platform.  The guys at http://www.ebay.com/usr/masscferguson?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2754 had two models of beacon for sale at the time.  I have one of the long range units listed, as well as a couple of their short range units.  The manufacturer is chinese and offers a development kit as well for free download.  The units are nice because you can program them for power level (to give you some control over range they are visible to your receivers.)  I got some email from them recently that a new model is out, but I have not played with them in a while.  Finally found the manufacturer: https://www.jaalee.com/store .
 
Right, I generally prefer to avoid Apple's offerings whenever possible, and don't make any use of them on a regular basis.  I have several iPads, an apple tv gen4 (what a mistake that was) and a Mac or two (unplugged currently), and none of their phones.  (Well, not active, I think there's a 3GS in a drawer somewhere).  
 
Thus it's good to see standalone implementations.  I'm sure I'll have a lot to learn and, no doubt run into a few disappointments.  I'll gladly listen to war stories if anyone wants to share about what didn't work!
 
The Beacons I posted offer both Android and iPhone SDKs, so not tied to iPhone.  I didn't recall if they did, as I don't do Android.   :mellow:   (much)
 
The single nicest advantage to the Nexus 7 tablets is being able to set up multiple users on them.  You can quickly swipe down from the top, select a different user and get right to any apps configured for them.  Makes it very simple to set up different collections of apps and their settings for each of us, and one for 'the house'.  Phones don't have this option, at least not the limited number of ones I've used (samsung, moto and LG, mainly).
 
But that has little to do with with beacons, at least not directly.
 
This is part of the reason why geo-fencing by a phone alone is less-than-ideal.  A tablet (with 4G LTE) leaving the house doesn't necessarily mean any one particular user has left with it.  Of course, nor would it mean I'd left just because I had been using the tablet before someone else swapped into their account.  Thus using just a device can't really give you enough information.  Now, for the typical single geek living in an apartment it might not seem like a problem.  But for a family with a diverse schedules, in a larger house, it starts getting unwieldy, fast.  So I'm casting about looking for what pieces of tech might be helpful.
 
wkearney99 said:
My interest here is to start building patterns of activity.  Overlay presence, departure and arrival of devices with timestamps and calendars.  Using that to build logic for handling automation.
Click to expand...
Just out of sheer curiosity, what automation system do you intend to use to consume the ibeacon reader messages delivered through MQTT ? OpenHUB perhaps ?  You do need something to implement logic, something like Homeseer or similar,  because conceptually ibeacons are nothing but glorified motion sensors providing more detailed information, of course.
 
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