BC011 iBeacon

Small, easy to "install" (double sided tape) and relatively inconspicuous for my purpose. I'm using this to automatically open my garage door when I get close and to reload a device driver in Home Assistant. My scenario: my garage door openers are fairly old (15+ years) and while they do work great, one of them has trouble receiving signal from my Homelink opener in my car. (I almost have to smash the car into the door to get it to open!) Our usual routine included me getting right up on (and I do mean RIGHT up on) the door, opening the OTHER door and going inside to open the door from the other side to my wife opening her mouth (oddly enough, that worked!) I suspect it's her retainer vibrating at the perfect frequency, similar to how Lucille Ball claimed she was picking up CIA radio traffic in her teeth fillings. Obviously, nowhere near ideal. The idea was to use a tracker of some sort, and during my research I found that you want an iBeacon type tracker (which this one is) that can be "programmed" so to speak (broadcast frequency, name, etc.) To integrate this with Home Assistant, you'll need an ESP32 running ESPHome as a BLE tracker/bluetooth proxy. You'll need the MAC address of this device (when you set it up through the app, you'll be able to find it) and define that in your ESP32; that way it doesn't just track every device around that's bluetooth. You'll set a minimum RSSI (received signal strength indicator) so that you don't get false triggers and a minimum time for the device to have lost connection so you don't get false openings. Oh and be sure to give it a name, sometimes Home Assistant/BLE tracker will reject items without a name. You'll need to have your garage door controlled by Home Assistant too, of course. I have a generic Tuya wifi dual-switch garage opener (since I have two doors; it's an older house.) When you leave you manually open (and close) the garage door of course, but the tracker will lose signal to the ESP32. Once it comes back into range ( i.e. it receives a minimum RSSI signal strength you defined before) it will trigger your garage door to open (through an automation you create in Home Assistant.) Mine also reloads an integration I have with my WiCAN pro device, ensuring my WiCAN connects to the garage wifi and updating the fuel/odometer/voltage levels in Home Assistant. If you're not sure how to set this up - ask AI! Seriously, use Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT - they can all help you with it. I did and mine works like a charm. Now when I pull through my gates (I live out in the country, we have gates around the property) my garage door starts opening before I even get near it. I don't even have to bother with my Homelink button other than to open my gates. This thing is small (little bigger than a quarter, and square-ish) so I just double-sided sticky-taped it to the underside of my control console on the ceiling of each of my vehicles. Best part is, since I have two - it can differentiate which door to open! If you just have one door it makes it even easier, but mine opens the correct door when we arrive. The ONLY thing is probably battery life - in order for mine to work the way it does, I have to set the beacon to broadcast twice a second, otherwise I'd be sitting at my door waiting for it to open and I may be where the antenna on the ESP32 can't see it. That means battery life is most likely going to be 6 months to a year (if I'm lucky.) You could probably make an external battery setup (like a pair of lithium AAA's) and that would last multiple years, but these little coin cells don't last all that long. I won't take a point off of for that, as it's just part of the design for it being small. Speaking of - make sure your ESP32 can sit outside for this; my garage faces the side of the house and I have a window facing the street, so I put it there, that way the trackers can be seen inside or out easily. An external antenna on the ESP32 is helpful too. NOTE: other non "iBeacon" types will depend on either Apple or Google for their tracking, and will have severe delays compared to this as they depend on a cloud service AND your phone connectivity. I tried this before and while it would sometimes work, it was very unreliable and when it did, would take forever to actually open the door. I'm halfway to my garage door and it's almost fully open with these AND they are fully local so no cloud service to depend on. Save the other trackers for things like your luggage or keys. I think you can even use these to triangulate a location by using multiple ESP32's too, but I haven't had a need to do that yet.

These Blue Charm beacons do exactly what they say they do. They were easy to set up, easy to program, and simple to attach to keys or place where needed. The app gives you access to useful settings like the beacon name, measured power, power profile, firmware updates, and different broadcast options depending on what your compatible device or system supports. Once configured, other compatible devices can detect them reliably, and they quietly do their job in the background. Overall, they’re a solid little product: easy to configure, easy to carry, and useful for a variety of Bluetooth beacon needs. I’d definitely recommend them.

Using these with room assistant to track everything from water bottles to my AirPods. They take a few seconds to update but their ease of setup and configuration options, ability to lock down and replaceable battery means I’ll be using these for quiet some time.

There are a few reasons to buy a beacon (any beacon actually) from Blue Charm: 1). Not many companies make proximity beacons and sell them piecemeal to lowly consumers who just want 1 or 2 to use them to do weird geofencing projects at home. Most of these big guys like Estimote don't sell individual beacons anymore and they definitely stopped supporting them and updating their apps. There aren't many sellers of proximity beacons an amazon besides BlueCharm actually...or even on the general web. 2) They work. If you're not a techy person, learn the tech and if you're not getting the beacon to work.. It's probably user error. However, if you’re having trouble getting it setup, see #3. 3) This is the biggie. Customer support. I sent a question about a project I was doing (wanted the beacon to track and send webhooks when I was very close to it) and Thomas (the owner) responded within an hour with a very detailed answer. He even got invested in the project I was working on and gave me different scenarios to try that he tested himself for my unique case! Wow. Can't ask for more hands on customer service than that. I'm getting to the bottom of my problem and it's definitely not the hardware beacon itself...it's another software issue that Thomas himself helped me discover. Besides all of this, he's obviously invested in what he's doing and is a good engineer. Definitely the go to choice for buying beacons. Support BlueCharm.

So far, so good. Working well with Home Assistant and tracking if the dogs are in the home/yard. Exactly what I needed.

Arrived with 60% battery life, so they must not sell well. Doesn't sync with their suggested App (KBeaconPro). It showed up once now wont find it again. So far nothing recognizes it. Feeling like a scam at this point. Very disappointed.

Configuration of this beacon is done via a generic android app. I reduced the beacon interval down to 4 seconds. Battery life is greater than a year. It's low profile, and I taped it to a paper card and put it in my wallet. In a pinch if I lose my wallet, I can use the app and scan for it and narrow down the room I lost my wallet in. No, it's not quite like a tile, but it works with open source projects like home assistant.

I bought this beacon after consulting with the BlueCharm Beacon support folks (they responded within a couple of hours of my request) because I wanted to experiment with scanning for beacons from an iOS app using CoreBluetooth as opposed to the Beacon APIs in CoreLocation. Since iBeacons aren't normally detectable using CoreBluetooth, I needed a beacon that could advertise in other formats, such as Eddystone. I was able to successfully scan for Eddystone UID and TLM payloads (I'll provide BlueCharm with the details so you can likely ask them directly about this if you are interested). The suggested KBeacon iOS app worked flawlessly for configuring the beacon. I was able to use it to change the UID/TLM payloads and then see those custom values in the advertising data when scanning with CoreBluetooth! Throughout this, BlueCharm support was very helpful and responsive to all of my questions. Thanks again!

Excellent product, install KBeacon app and you have the option to change the configure, much more options to configure than tile.

I don't know what this beacon capable of, and the kbeacon app detected this, but shown error when tried to connect it. so not exactly know what this beacon capable of. my use case is too simple and I'm just using this as a dump beacon only. so as long as the ble receiver able to read its signal, the beacon is working for me. This thing is considered expensive with regarded as a dump beacon in my use case. let see how long this device can last. The beacon comes with a cr2032 preinstalled though. nothing to install for my use case.