The tags can be detected using bluetoothctl. You’ll also need an MQTT broker - mosquitto or the native broker in Home Assistant should be fine.

As this has built in bluetooth it was easy enough to install the tools to detect the BLE devices and to install Room Assistant on it. My Home Assistant device is a Raspberry Pi 3 B that doubles as a media player.

Then I came across Room Assistant and everything clicked. The HappyBubbles devices look good but $30 still seems a bit much for fiddling. The Nut is a square device an inch or so square, and i ordered a couple at £3.00 or so that turned out to be coming from China and still haven’t arrived, so I tried a couple at £6.00 or so which turned up in a few days.Īs I now understood that what I was looking for was presence detection it was easier to find what I needed. I got a couple from a UK supplier (there are a few). The iTags are square or triangular Bluetooth 4.0 BLE devices and cost a couple of quid each. The common devices at the moment are iTag and Nut, which are both application oriented but are really just simple BLE devices which send a MAC address and name. So I started fishing around for cheap things to play with and found a plentiful supply on eBay. I started off looking into Eddystone and iBeacon devices but they seem to be too application oriented and I couldn’t get my phone working with them - interestingly this seems to due to the security differences between stock Android and LineageOS - but I couldn’t really get this to work usefully. The obvious use case seemed to be to have your phone as the presence token. This is a few notes on BLE-based presence detection.

Home assistant raspberry pi zero w