- I have no garage door opener so I added a tag in my car to open the smart garage without having to open the app and fiddle with things.
- I added a tag to our light switch that turns on our bedroom lamp (softer, more pleasant light at night).
- I added a door tag to unlock the door (no information contained on the tag so nobody can break in).
- I added a tag that pauses an automation at night so my stair lights don’t come on with motion sensing.
This is literally just the tip of the iceberg. I think of a new one every couple hours. Anyone have any other cool ones to share?
I started with NFC tags but whipping out my phone everytime I needed to scan a tag got annoying so I switched to bluetooth beacons. I have automations fired by button taps and proximity. MUCH easier and less hassle.
I’ve been thinking about getting into Bluetooth beacons lately. What kind are you using?
Anything that broadcasts ibeacon format will work flawlessly in HA.
Definitely curious, how do you set these up and what do you recommend getting?
I don’t want to make any specific recommendations but any ibeacon signal emitting BLE beacon works perfectly with HA’s default bluetooth integration, Bluetooth Low Energy integration and ESPresense.
Can you use BLE for presense detection such that your phone is beaconing and when you enter an area an ESP32 (or something like it) picks it up? Or is this really only useful the other way where there’s a beacon and some s/w on the phone picks it up?
Using the phone as a beacon drains battery like stupid in my case. My ble ibeacons are tied to HA, I don’t use the phone for any kind of beacon tx or rx.
@bpnine you can definitely use it like that. Look at espresence.com for some examples or esphome.io Bluetooth low energy device. The first site has some good info. Not all phones / watches are compatible
I use ESPresence with a little esp32-board for presence detection (Tracking 3 iPhones). It works like a charm and is very reliable. In my case it doesn’t drain the phone battery at all eventhough iPhones are really „talkative“ on the BLE-channel in general.