Happy Bubbles: bought, now time to install. Some questions!

[Mspinolo]

Hi all,

i bought 1 presence detector and 2 iBeacon from happy bubbles and it is now time to install them.

I didn't have much time to play with it and "study" what i need to do so if someone could confirm what i understood is right....it would be great.

My plan is to use them in conjunction with Home Assistant on a RPI3.

As far as I understood i have to:

 - Install an MQTT broker on RPI 3

 - Happy Bubbles - Bluetooth Beacon Presence Detection Server on RPI3 and connect it to MQTT broker

 - Connect Presence detector to Happy Bubbles - Bluetooth Beacon Presence Detection Server on RPI3

 - set up presence detector to detect my ibeacon

at that stage i should have in home assistant a new tracked device.

is that correct?

[nemik]

Not exactly. You should point both your presence server and your detectors to the same MQTT broker. The detectors shouldn't connect to the presence server directly, they need to connect to the MQTT broker.

Otherwise yea, you got it. Good luck and hopefully it's useful for you.

[Mspinolo]

thanks! I will try to set everything up!

[Mspinolo]

So today i have time to start the install.

I have a quick question: i see from the RPI3 install script that the first thing it does is to install Mosquito

#!/bin/sh


# first update apt
sudo apt-get update


# install dependencies
sudo apt-get install mosquitto mosquitto-clients

now my simple question: is it possible to use Home Assistant default MQTT broker (HBMQTT broker) or is Mosquitto needed / recommended?

kind regards,

Michele

[nemik]

I recommend mosquitto because I know it works. I haven't tested the HBMQTT broker. But if you can and report the results, it'd be appreciated! Good luck.

[Mspinolo]

So confirmed HBMQTT does not work so i revert to Mosquitto

Now i have another issue: beacon tracking is very discontinuous and strange.

I set everything up and seems to work but, for example, if i go to the "added beacons" page i would expect to see the beacons I added permanently listed there.

Most of the time, instead, they are not

Also Homeassistant tracking seems quite wrong but i suspect the issue is due to me (user) and upstream for some reasons: so i would like to make sure first everything works as expected at presence server level

Nemik can you provide some hints?

[nemik]

OK sorry to hear that but thanks for the info.

First, how far apart are your detectors and are there walls between them? The further apart they are, the better. The detectors and presence server try to do their best but BLE signal strength can be finicky and vary even depending on where the antenna on your beacon is oriented.

Another thing you can do is play with the presence server settings, in particular the "Location Confidence" setting. The presence server looks for which detector sees the strongest signal for a beacon each second, and that value means that a detector should be the strongest for X times in a row before it'll "officially" switch the beacon to that location. So the trade-off is latency for accuracy. The higher this value, the longer it'll take to detect switching between rooms but the more accurate it will be.

The signal-strength to location algorithms in the presence server are a bit primitive and I'd like to one day improve them and introduce more advanced ones using better machine learning approaches.

If your detectors have to be close together, then having beacons with adjustable signal transmission strengths is a good idea so that you can reduce that signal strength for better accuracy; plus their batteries will last longer that way.

I hope this helps!

[Mspinolo]

so an update on that!

reverting to Mosquitto was not an issue: very quick to do an best for the future.

in terms of the issue i had, as i suspected, where user related: i have 2 beacons and i did not set major/minor ending having the same device ID for both...hence the presence server was going crazy i believe!

let's see now if i can fix it!