Using a small ble usb transmitter

[PianSom]

Hello Andrew

Following a suggestion on the HA forum, I purchased a few small ble transmitters, with a view to trying the in a car as an arrival sensor. This is the hardware

I am having some issues with the script recognising them. In particular, it doesn't! Though, looking at the logs, my suspicion is that the powering on of a device does trigger a scan.

If I run (on a Pi, not a Pi Zero running monitor) the command
sudo hcitool lescan & \; sudo hcidump
then I get the output

LE Scan ...
98:7B:F3:49:BA:71 (unknown)
98:7B:F3:49:BA:71 ebeoo-49BA71
<other devices redacted>

(Note that the first MAC address returned does not have a name, whereas the second returns the name of the device.)

If, on the same Pi, I run
hcitool name 98:7B:F3:49:BA:71
then nothing is returned.

This makes me wonder whether the device reliably returns its name to the monitor script. Do you have any thoughts on this behaviour? What information can I supply to assist with any diagnosis?

(FWIW my suspicion is that the transmit power on these things is going to be too low to usefully use in my car anyway.)

[andrewjfreyer]

You won't see iBeacons in the standard lescan output. We have to process raw packets coming out of hcidump --raw

If you run monitor from the command line with the beacon flag -b, do you see any of the beacons?

[PianSom]

Hi

Yes, it finds it:

Starting monitor.sh (v. 0.1.481)...
> beacon scan mode enabled
> preference: delay between scans = 3
> preference: periodic arrive/depart check interval = 90
> preference: periodic arrive interval = 90
> preference: periodic depart interval = 120 
> preference: database refresh interval = 120
> preference: max arrival scan attempts = 2
> preference: max depart scan attempts = 4
> preference: random advertisement expiration = 35
> stopping other instances of 'monitor.sh'
0.1.481 04:40:51 pm [CMD-BEAC]	98:7B:F3:4A:99:7C 00000000-0000-0000-C000-000000000028 1 1 ebeoo-4A997C  Unknown
0.1.481 04:40:54 pm presence/owner/pi0kit/00000000-0000-0000-C000-000000000028-1-1 { version : 0.1.481, confidence : 100, name : ebeoo-4A997C , timestamp : Thu Aug 09 2018 16:40:51 GMT+0100 (BST), manufacturer : Unknown , type : iBeacon ,"type":"iBeacon", "rssi":"-53", "power":"-59" } 

(This, I think, is a different beacon from my first post.)

[PianSom]

So, is it possible to scan for both normal bluetooth devices and simultaneously for beacons? Or is it either/or?

EDIT - oh yes, it is. So all I need to do is add the -b flag. Thanks!

[andrewjfreyer]

unless I've misunderstood, it seems that the ibeacons are working. yay! I'll close the issue.