New HB Install - found an iBeacon - what is it?

[Adrian Merwood]

I just setup my first couple of HB detectors and have them talking to my owntracks-recorder docker mosquitto server.  I have a presenced docker up and running and talking to HomeAssistant.   I have a RadiusNetworks dot configured and talking to the setup, took a little trial and error but everything seems to be working.  With a few tweaks to names etc I will be happy.

The interesting thing is I have the Dot configured as an eddystone UID device - which is fine seems to work as I want.  If I go to Latest seen beacons I can pick it up and add it to Added beacons.  

Some questions for the wise:

1. In latest seen beacons I can also see lots of "raw" entries - what are these?
   
2. In latest seen beacons I can also see an ibeacon device but I have no idea what this might be - how can I figure out what it is?
   
3. On the Presence server UI I can see "Added Buttons: - what goes here?
   

[nemik]

Adrian,

Glad to hear you got things working. I'll try to answer your questions:

1. "raw" is just any Bluetooth Low Energy advertisement that Happy Bubbles can't parse; so it means it's something other than an iBeacon, Eddystone UID, or Happy Bubbles Button advertisement, since those are the only ones supported at this time. That means 'raw' could be a Fitbit, Chromecast, some BLE weighing scale, whatever else with BLE. There are many many different things.

2. Sometimes you can't. If you have an idea of what device it might be, try bringing the device within a few feet of a Happy Bubbles detector and go to the "Latest seen" menu to see which one has the strongest signal and that's probably your device. I suppose you could also connect a Happy Bubbles Detector to a USB battery pack for power and move it around your house to try to locate where such devices are! I haven't actually done this, but it's possible.

3. This is a new product I haven't yet put in the store but added functionality for first in the server. The git repo for it is here: https://github.com/happy-bubbles/ble_button

The current beacons I sell ( https://www.happybubbles.tech/presence/beacon ) have a button on them which is currently just used to turn the beacon. I made a special firmware for them that makes it act as an Eddystone beacon advertising every 400ms with a unique ID, and when you push the button it publishes that on a special MQTT topic "happy-bubbles/presence/button/<the-button-ID>"

Does this sound interesting or something you'd find useful? I hope to begin selling them this month.