[Tutorial] Presence detection with bluetooth beacon

I see you bought these tags also, how did you get them to work? They don’t popup in the Beacon app at my side…

Checked if there is a battery inside? As they come from China? The ones from Ali I ordered before didn’t have one, took me quite some time to figure that out :stuck_out_tongue:

Haha, no that one I figured out, pressing the button gives me a small green LED blinking few times.

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No one?

I don’t remember exactly, but just keep on trying, also with long presses to reset the module? Eventually it will pair!

Hello. I have bought five of NRF51822 . I was able to add them to Homey via the BEACON App. For the sake of testing them, I have created a simple flow that is supposed to send me a notification when the beacon is outside range.

I put one in my car and drove away with it. For some reason, HOMEY is simply not detecting any status change. See Screenshot.


I am not sure what the issue is.

Is the automatic detection activated in the apps settings? Or are you updating manually?

Yes. It is.

.

I have question though: What’s the normal behaviour of the app?
1- if the beacon is on and in range, it will show as detected.
2- If the beacon does not go out of range, what should the app show? Assume a beacon got detected 2 hours ago, the app keeps on showing detected two hours ago. Does this mean that Homey is not checking and updating the status?
3- If the beacon’s battery goes off, shouldn’t it appear as as out of range? In my case, even after removing the battery, the app is not updating its status! As you can see, now after 11 hours and me removing the battery several times, it is still showing as detected.

You can find more information of the app here: [APP][Pro] Beacon - Detect your presence with BLE beacons

This app integrate the basic flows for BLE beacons into Homey. Once the app is installed it will do a discovery of BLE devices, after a short adjustable timeout it wil keep discovering. After each discovery the app compares the found devices with the one paired. If the beacon is not found within the new “discovered list” the beacon is changed in state.

For filtering out false positives there is a verification amount inside or outside the range available in the settings. This setting is the amount of times the beacon needs to be changed before it wil marked as such. The amount will be reset if the beacon is not in that current state.

And here is some Q&A

Q1 Why is the beacon marked ‘outside range’ when i use the beacon with my phone?

If a BLE beacon is connected to a device (phone) it cannot be discovered anymore and the app set the device as away. You can prevent this by removing the app from your phone.

Q2 Why is the beacon marked ‘outside range’ after a couple of minutes?

Your beacon is powering down for saving energy. Sometimes this is configurable by the manufacturer his software.

Q3 Is the app compatibel with v2.0.0?

The app will be compatible from version v1.2.1 on Homey firmware > v2.0.5

Looks in your case that the automatic update isn’t running anymore. Have you tried to reboot Homey? Can you send the developer an log, then i’ll look into this.

Got a Gigaset keeper today.
Installation was easy, but after some minutes the device goes standby and is “out of range”
Of course this is not useful for presence detection.
Does anybody know how to deactivate standby?
Or is there another solution?

BTW" the Gigaset G-Tag works fine

@Austriacus
Gigaset G-Tag is interesting!
Which Homey app do you use for this?
T.i.a.
Cheers

I use the Beacon App from Leendert De Kok

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Gets horrible reviews tho

Thanks @Otter !

Same overhere!

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Thanks for the complements! :beers:

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True, but there are other alternatives for the pricebut if it works it works

I know, I know. I always do my own research as well.

When it’s working, it works perfect. No better detection then this app and I tried them all.

I just need to restart the app each day automatically and somehow someway I have a couple of tags that worked for months end then stop. New battery doesn’t work etc weird but I just have a few spares and it’s worth it

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