Info about Happy Bubbles

[Mspinolo]

Hi all,

I am new here and have a couple of very basic questions i couldn't find the answer on the website.

I would like to integrate in my Home Assistant installation a more robust "at home" presence detection and happy bubbles seems really designed for that.

Plan would be:

 - Buy a BLE presence detector

 - Buy some decent range / long battery life beacon

Now the questions:

 - does the presence detector have a case or is it sold naked? in the latter case is it possible to buy a case somewhere?

 - Happy Bubbles Presence Beacon is great but with 30 days of batter life I am a bit scared about WAF: i noticed there are BLE products using CR2032 battery (same as happy bubbles?) claiming 1y battery life. Would they serve the scope?

thanks to anyone who will answer

[nemik]

Hi,

1. The detect is sold 'naked'. I don't yet have any manufacturing partners for a case. bruhautomation was kind enough to design and share a 3D printed case: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2028844 so if you have access to a 3D printer, you could make your own. The dimensions for the detector are here: https://www.happybubbles.tech/images/ble-detector-dimensions.png

For something off-the-shelf and cheap, this will work nicely: http://amzn.to/2GlNdCt

2. I think that one should work. You absolutely don't need to use the ones in my shop, any beacon using Bluetooth Low Energy will work fine. The thing with the ones you linked to, is that if you pair them with your phone and use their app, then they will stop broadcasting advertisements and the Happy Bubbles detectors will not be able to see them because they're connected to the phone. So as long as you don't use their apps, you're fine.

The other thing though is that beacons work best for presence detection when they advertise every 500ms or sooner. It depends on your use-case, but that's the best for most people. With beacons like the ones I sell, you can adjust that advertisement interval how you want, to decide between better latency or better battery life. With the one you linked to, I'm not sure that kind of fine-tuning is possible.

I hope this helps!

[Mspinolo]

Hi Nemik,

thanks for the quick and detailed answer.

My use case will be to attacher a BLE tag to home keys to track "at home" presence detection in a reliable way to trigger some Home assistant automations.

I have no idea of the advertising rate i need but what i am sure i need a decent battery life or WAF will be too low.

In any case i just placed an order for 2 beacon and 1 presence detector from Happy Bubbles: to make it work having more control on advertising rate would be good and then understand what i really need.

Also the support here seems very good!

Last question: you quote 30-days battery life for beacons, is it considering 500ms advertising rate? would it be correct saying that with 1s advertising rate battery life will almost double?

[nemik]

Yes the 30 days is assuming and 400ms or 500ms advertising interval and you're correct, if you double it to 1 second you basically double battery life. 

It all depends on your use-case though and how quickly you want the system to react on presence and your environment. If you're in a place with a lot of Bluetooth and 2.4GHz traffic, just because the beacon advertises, for example every second, doesn't mean the detector will always pick it up. Something else might interfere in that time and it may pick it up on the next advertisement or the one after, but by that point 3 seconds could have gone by. So if you need your system to react within a second or two, it's best to to have a 300ms or so advertising interval. But if you care about latency measured in tens of seconds or even minutes, then 1 second or even more is fine and you'll have better battery life. It takes a bit of experimentation since a lot of people expect different things, that's why I worked hard to make this system as flexible as possible.