How well do beacons work? (2018)

[JDRoberts]

Have you read the following thread? It covers most of the available options.

Dog Collar presence?

I’m seeing quite a bit of confusion in this topic so maybe we can back up a minute and look at a couple of the basic concepts and then look at a couple of the possible devices. Because it is possible to do this, it just may not work quite the way people originally expected. Part 1: Presence in SmartThings “Presence” in SmartThings is way simpler than most people expect. All you need is a device type Handler with “capability.presence” and then that presence can be turned on and off for that device. (Of course you have to have a reason to turn present on or off, that is an event that you can capture, but that’s a separate issue.) This capability is why you can have a virtual presence sensor, which is just a virtual switch, and you can turn that virtual switch on and off from within Smart…