iBeacons

[CopyCatz]

Does anyone have actual experience in using iBeacons? Both at home and at work I'm looking at options for indoor navigation. While iBeacons do not really support real triangulation/direction, they might offer a way to get more info into Domoticz as to which rooms people are in. They work using detected distances (close, near, far) so that in a museum you could offer visitors info on the painting they are standing in front of. At home, if you would lay out a planned grid of beacons it would be possible to get some kind of indoor positioning using a mobile app and Domoticz. I see some issues when implementing multiple floors (you could be "near" a beacon that is actually a floor below) and I'm wondering how exact the reported distances really are. I found two candidates for a test setup:

http://kontakt.io/product/beacon/
http://estimote.com/

They are a bit pricey though.. Maybe if we got a bunch of people together we could do a group buy and share experiences?

[LanWolf]

Currently i tried geofancy's ibeacon, they also have a ibeacon app(i installed on my ipad air, but couldn't get it to work properly. (Geofancy doesnt switch when Gatting in or out of range)

Also tried to create an ibeacon with my mac's Bluetooth.

Geofancy sees them both, but doesn'T switch anything off or on when gettting in or out of range.

The range of the bt on the ipad is around 15 meter in the house, so that might allready bit to much for rooms. I dont know what the range of a "real" ibeacon is.

Before i would go in buying them i woul like to see it does work

[Dynamic]

This may be interesting in case you want to try things out, without having to buy expensive hardware:
http://www.wadewegner.com/2014/05/creat ... pberry-pi/

[robybob]

I have done some experiments: both with Estimote and RaspPi. Estimote application on Android provides you with the capability to change RF power level in order to reduce the RF range emission and it might provide you with a more sensitive device for near field position. It might be interesting to integrate an USB beacon device on RasPi (ie Inatech BLE) within Domoticz as it might trigger events in the case a mobile phone is detected nearby...
I am plenty available to discuss it ...
Bob

[robybob]

BTW... is there anybody who has already integrated bluetooth sensors with domoticz ??

[whiteduck]

I've just purchased two iBeacons from http://www.avvel.co.uk/shop - I went for the small round devices at £15 each. They are the Jaalee devices and will stick to most surfaces with the supplied 3M sticker.

I can "see" them on my Samsung Tab S (eBeacon app) but my iPhone 5 needs an iOS 8 upgrade before it works and currently the Geofancy app doesn't appear to work although it could be something I am doing wrong. I set one to have a minor number of 1 and the other 2.

With these I have two choices:
- Leave in the house so when I approach my phone calls a URL - people have mentioned some security considerations with HTTP.
- Put one in the car and use a USB bluetooth (BLE) adaptor - this way I could put a script that picks up the distance estimation and figures out approaching / leaving / present.
- Stick one on a keyring and do similar to the car option.

Can anyone recommend an alternative app to Geofancy or some guidance on how to get it to work properly?

Thanks a lot
Ian

[m_g_s_g]

I'm also interested in the beacon technology, and have bought some gimbal beacons. They are vey cheap and backed up by a big company. I've played with the samples from this nice blog post, http://vincenth.net/blog/archive/2014/0 ... marin.aspx. It's not that hard to play with the bluez stack under Raspbian, so it could be eventually integrated with domoticz in the future.

There are plenty of devices using ble now, and many many more to come... Unfortunately, many of them use proprietary protocols to pair with closed phone apps.

[mongoose]

What ever happened to http://wisee.cs.washington.edu

[whiteduck]

Interesting one I've seen that has temperature and other sensors:
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product ... 42215.html

Seems to be available from Amazon in UK assuming that one isn't a clone.

Anyone played with this?

[jmleglise]

Have a look here for a ibeacon presence detection viewtopic.php?f=28&t=10640&p=85254#p85250