Beacons and Smarthings

It’s the other way around. The " receiving station" app on Your phone recognizes the IBeacon. See the following post:

With Kontact, you will need to use their app as the receiving station on your phone. But as long as that app can send an HTTP post you can then communicate with smart things either cloud to cloud or via IFTTT’s maker channel. If the app can’t send an HTTP post, if you can send a text you can go through IFTTT that way.

I could still use beaconthings as a receiving station as well correct?

Beacon things is a receiving station app. I don’t know if it can work with Kontact or not, though. Ask in their thread:

Cool, thanks so much for your help!

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Sorry to bug you but when I go to get a URL it gives me and error “error”:true,“type”:“AccessDenied”,“message”:"This request is not authorized by the specified access token. Do you know what I could be doing wrong? I did check the OAuth box.

Sorry, what’s the context for this question?

Oh sorry, regarding the POC smartapp. I click to get the URL and it throws that error.

Things have changed a lot since that was written. I’m not even sure if that method works anymore. But you can use the IFTTT maker channel in a very similar way.

Otherwise one of the master coders can discuss a current approach. (I rely on text to speech, so I don’t actually do anything with code anymore. )

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K, again I appreciate your help. I just worry about security so I wanted to try and tie from the Kontakt web portal so I could do major minor shuffling. It’s probably not a big deal not to use that security feature, but it would have gave me some peace of mind.

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I am having the same issue and I am using Rad Beacon I have to refresh hitting save as well. I have the location on always too. Will pollster work here?

Hi.

I have one beacon from Radius, but i just cant figure out how to add it to BeaconThings.

@Glenn_Lunell: Make sure the UUID of the beacon matches the UUID in the app settings.

Hello all - I know this is an old topic, but I wanted to refresh it. I have just converted to SmartThings Hub v3 (from v1), and am redoing my whole setup and configuration. I’ve always wanted to use Beacons for presence detection but wasn’t able to make it work. I found this thread but discovered that the BeaconThings app that is mentioned a few times is no longer available.

Does anyone have any recommendations for using beacons in your home to detect presence?

What I’d like to do is have my wife and I attach a Radius Networks beacon to our keys (or something we carry with us all the time), and then use ST to determine where we are.

As an example, I work from home, and one of the things I’d like to do is have ST know when I go into my office in the morning, and then automate a few things when it sees I’m in the office.

The garage door example provided is also something I’m looking to do.

Does anyone have any suggestions? My initial thought was to spread several Raspberry Pi’s around the house/property that can detect the beacons. Then use which Pi’s my beacon is connected to, to determine my location. But I’m open to any suggestions…

You can use anything that can detect the iBeacon and then send a Web hook to IFTTT, for example.

By early 2017, most of the iBeacon manufacturers offer their own developer software, so the independent apps just kind of fell away as they weren’t really needed anymore. If you have a good programming background, just look into the SDKs that the manufacturer provides and you may find everything you need as far as the receiving station code goes. :sunglasses:

Thanks! I hadn’t thought of using the Radius SDK (not sure why).

When you say Web Hook, are you referring to a simple HTTP POST or GET command? Just trying to wrap my brain around it is all.

Thanks for your assistance and the very quick reply!

Yes. :sunglasses:

Home assistant also has the ability to set up iBeacons, Although that’s probably overkill unless you were planning to use it already:

There is a third-party app which is still being updated and supports Ibeacons, myHome by Wisseman, and the IBeacon support is quite good, but the app as a whole tends to crash and it costs a lot, I think $15, so I don’t recommend that unless you’re desperate or really short of time or just want to do a proof of concept.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myhome-home-automation/id1064362767?mt=8

I don’t know if BTrigger is still available or not, but it was a really nice super simple third-party app that pretty much did nothing except notifications and Webhooks.

BTrigger by Yanc
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/btrigger/id883566531?mt=8

But you can write the same thing yourself with the Eskimote or radius networks SDK.

Definitely. I will check out Home Assistant just for the heck of it, and will probably go down the Radius SDK road for the time being.

One last question for you - would you recommend something like UWB instead of iBeacons? Given the ability to fix a position much more accurately. No idea how much the hardware and beacon/tag will run though. Just curious your thought on the subject.

Thanks so much for your assistance JD

I think UWB Sounds OK in theory, but in practice there’s a reason most people have never heard of it. I might consider it for a big warehouse installation where I controlled every bit of frequency running through that building, but in a residential home, I don’t think it’s anywhere there yet.

Plus there’s the issue that you get with everything, including Bluetooth, that since the signal passes through walls ( and floors and ceilings) it’s hard to define a “room” unless you triangulate, and then it’s getting expensive.

i use iBeacons for two things. First, to create a very narrow detection zone which is just the wheelchair ramp at the front door, which then becomes part of my Geo presence triggers. And second, as a touchless switch with the detection range set to about 4 inches.

By the way, you might look at some of the “micro location” threads in the forum. A lot of people are relying instead on things like contact sensors to tell when people have gone in and out of a room. The old “wasp in a box” problem. They don’t work if you have a bunch of little kids running around the house, but if there’s just one or two of you it might be worth considering.

https://community.smartthings.com/tags/microlocation