Here’s where we share project write-ups sent to us by some of our home automation customers.
If you would like to share your own project here, please write up a description with as much pertinent info as possible (intro, hardware, description, etc), then send to me at Thomas at bluecharmbeacons dot com. Thanks in advance for sharing!
Beacon-Powered Garage Door Opener
This one can be done on its own or, like I did, as an extension of the trash can reminder project. Please click the link below:
Link to Beacon-Powered Garage Door Opener
Beacon-Powered Reminder To Take Out The Trash
This one is written by yours truly, and it’s a bit long, so I am going to give it its own webpage. Please click the link below:
Link to Beacon-Powered Reminder To Take Out The Trash project
Dog Collar Beacon System by E.T.
Introduction
I use a BLE beacon attached to my dog’s harness to automatically lock and unlock my front door when we go on daily walks with my dog.
Hardware
I use Home Assistant for all of my home automation needs, ESP32 devices flashed with ESPHome, and a Z-wave Door Lock. I actually run it inside a VM on a Windows machine with VMware Player. I initially ran it on an Raspberry Pi but it became sluggish after I loaded too many integrations on it, and then my SD card failed because of the constant database writes. For basic automation, I still think a Raspberry Pi is probably the most cost-effective and energy efficient solution. The current solution is nice because I can run as many docker containers as I feel like and it also doubles as my BlueIris server.
Description
A BLE Beacon is attached to my dog’s harness, and I have an ESP32 device located near the front door for passive BLE scanning. When my dog and I leave the house for our walk and the beacon goes out of range, my front door will lock behind me.
Also, certain automations that would normally trigger when I leave my house, i.e., thermostat setting to away-mode, etc., will not trigger because Home Assistant assumes that when me and my dog are “away” together during certain hours, we are going on a short walk, and those “away” automations are unnecessary. When we return from our walk and come up to my front porch, the BLE beacon will reappear in-range and unlock the front door to allow for easy entry.
Since this involves entry to my house, other conditions have to be met when the beacon comes in to range: First, the PIR motion detector near my front door must be actively detecting motion; second, I have to be “home,” i.e., my phone has to be within my geofence or connected to WiFi. This way, I never have to bring my keys/mess with them when we go on our walks twice a day, and I don’t have to stand outside my door trying to manually unlock my door with my phone, which can be a problem on colder days. This is also comparatively safer than simply using my phone as presence detection, as it eliminates false triggers from me doing yardwork, returning home from work/errands, etc.
Using an IBeacon With ESPresence by C.W.
Introduction
ESPresence is an application that runs on an ESP32 device. It detects the proximity of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices and publishes the information to an MQTT broker. A home automation system can then subscribe to the publication and act upon the changes.
A BLE device can be a phone or a simple beacon like the Blue Charm iBeacon. In some cases, the iBeacon is the better choice. One example: iPhones do not transmit any information that can uniquely identify it from all other iPhones. If there are more than one in range of an ESPresence device they will be indistinguishable from one another. Another example is if you want to track a pet, you can just attach an iBeacon to its collar.
Setup
You will need to acquire an ESP32 device for each location where you want to track presence. The ESPresence site has a list of compatible devices on its base station page. One useful device is a M5StickC. It has a small display, that will show the id of a BLE device when it is brought within a few inches of it. A much cheaper alternative is an ATOM lite.
Before setting up your devices, you will need a running instance of an MQTT broker. Mosquitto is one of the more popular ones. With the broker set up, you can flash the EPS32’s with ESPresence. There is web based installer on the ESPresence web site that make the process pretty simple. A manual method is describe as well. Once the BLE device is up and running and connected to the same WiFi network as the MQTT broker, you can connect to it via your browser and enter your MQTT IP address and credentials. This process is also described on the ESPresence website. The only other essential setting you will need to address is the filtering distance. The default distance is pretty far. Set this so that the ranges of your base stations don’t overlap.
Once the base station is set up. You will start seeing messages in the MQTT broker. The messages will have the id of the iBeacon. MQTT Explorer is a free app that can be used to view the MQTT traffic. The beacon appears under Devices and starts with “iBeacon:” followed by the unique id you set for it.
Uses
One use case for this installation is using it in a home automation system to determine the presence of the phone/iBeacon in a room. A common automation is to turn off the lights in a room if no one is present. This is typically done using motion sensors. When there is no motion for a period of time, the lights are turned off. The problem is when some one is reasonably motionless, such as when they are watching TV or reading, they won’t be detected. Adding a test for the presence of the phone/iBeacon to the automaton solves the problem.
Another use case is with a text to speech message broadcast. The home automation system can use the location of the phone/iBeacon to determine which speaker to use to deliver the message.
Using a Motion Sensitive iBeacon (BC08) to trigger mail delivery notification by Nick F.
Description
I’m running Home Assistant and MQTT dockers on my server at home. I’m running ESPresense on several ESP32’s to detect the beacons and send data to Home Assistant via MQTT.
I have one particular use case for motion sensing that I’m using successfully. I’ve attached the Blue Charm to the bottom of my mailbox and turned the motion sensitivity high enough to trigger whenever the mailbox door is closed. I can successfully receive the beacon’s broadcast with an ESP32 in my garage, which triggers an automation in HA to notify us whenever the mail is here 🙂
I spent some time fine-tuning the mailbox sensor and so far it’s working great. I bumped the sensitivity down by 1 because I had a couple false-positives due to high winds. Also I originally had it mounted with regular Velcro but I learned that it’s so soft, it seems to introduce some shock-absorption which was actually preventing the motion sensor from detecting sometimes. I swapped that out for the rigid, “dual lock” kind and it’s been reliable ever since.
The Blue Charm is working great, and I plan to order several more soon!
If you would like to share your own project here, please write up a description with as much pertinent info as possible (intro, hardware, description, etc), then send to me at Thomas at bluecharmbeacons dot com. Thanks in advance for sharing!