Beacon to detect presence?

Devices
1

I am considering using a beacon to detect presence. Can anyone share his/her experience with such a device to detect presence? Can you recommend a brand and model?

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2

Hello,
Please take a look here:

Lots of discussions about beacons :wink:

Cheers

3

Hi Peter,
I have partly read that thread. Indeed, that’s a lot of information to digest but I gave up after about 250 posts and couldn’t really get a definite answer to my questions. I hoped someone could share some fresh information on reliability and models to buy.

4

In short, a beacon is a beacon in my world.
Only the range varies between make and models.
Beacons have to be publicly discoverable for use with the Beacon app.
F.i. the Tile [model] 2020 and up are not publicly discoverable anymore…

I use the cheapest Beacons I could find, and they work fine.

The Beacon app added support for Eddystone UID and iBeacons

There’s also Ruuvitag, an open source app and beacon.

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5

Up until firmware 6 Beacons were a reliable way to do presence detection, albeit the app leaked memory. There’s an easy workaround to restart the app automatically every night. No biggy as long as you have memory to spare or apply the workaround.

Since then Homey pushed out firmware V6 really fast after V5, with lots of Bluetooth changes. They were thinking it is backward compatible, but that was not really true. Without much time for the users to check and for the Beacon app developer to adjust, it was pushed to production.

So problems started popping up which the developer seems to be working on. That is what the fuss is about. Seeing they are on it, it may already be fine again. If not I haven’t lost faith in the developer (and Athom) just yet. So I suggest you keep track on the bottom of the post to see how far they are. I believe some have got it stable again, but maybe not all.

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6

True, but I believe it will get solved someday :wink: , and it still works for me here, just keep the polling intervals under 30secs.

Someone here said Athom tests RC versions with alpha testers, but still official firmware is pushed to quick imho. I don’t know why they do that. Except if a major security bug has been found, I can’t think of a reason to push it “in a hurry”.

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