XY Smart Beacon, can it be used as presence sensor?

General Discussion
1

I couldn’t find anything on the community about the XY Bluetooth Smart Beacon. But has anyone looked into this? Can this be use with SmartThings as a presence sensor? It’s a little cheaper and a lot smaller. It might only work with the Hub V2 since it only have Bluetooth.

2

yeah, hub v2 will be a must, but only after the bluetooth radio is activated, it won’t be at launch.

3

Would be great to see the tile app supported once the bluetooth gets going on v2 as well :smile:

1 Like
4

@johnathan398 nice find. Now we can only hope they will work with the hub v2 when ST activate it. Is anyone currently using these types of bluetooth beacon devices with their ST? Any links? Thanks.

5

This isn’t really an iBeacon device other than using the name beacon. This is a typical Finder tile. There are a bunch of these using different protocols. There are some community members currently using the brand “wireless tags” for this.

There are also a number of community members, myself included, who are using actual IBeacons.

The main advantage of true ibeacons is the region concept. You can define both the main area like “home” and a smaller area with in that main area like a particular room. This gives you a lot of interesting options.

And it doesn’t have to have Bluetooth in the hub obviously since so many of us are using it with the V one hub. For more information on how people are using ibeacons right now with smartthings see the following topic: