Loacate some iPhones - I'm lost

Hi Karl,

first of all thanks for alkl your work. This seems to have grown to an incredible pile of information - as it seems, too much for me...

What I am trying to do seems to be quit simple and staright forward ( at least that's what I thounght)
I simply wanted o detect the presence of a few iPhones in my house. So I setup your piBeancon Plugin and a Raspberry Pi3 with the completely configured image.
I can say that the Pi runs in my network and seems to be doing it's job. It is connected via Wifi.

What I can't seem to get is a reliable device in the piBeacon devices that show up or down.

I have the folowing devices at hand:
1. iPad Mini 2, iOS 10.3. Beta 1
2. iPad Air 2, iOS 10.2.1
3. iPad 3, iOS 9
4. iPhone 6, iOS 10.2.1
5. iPhone 4s, iOS 9.3.5
6. iPhone 7, iOS 10.2.1

Assuming that the bluetooth button in the iOS settings really turns bluetooth off I am trying to test the presence detection of the system.

1. iPad Mini2 shows almost instantly.
2. iPad Air2 works as well
3. iPad 3 never shows up
4. iPhone 6 shows up, but uses the same UUID as the iPad Mini
5. iPhone 4s, never shows up
6. iPhone 7 show up, but uses the same UUID as iPad Mini

I might understand that iPad3 and iPhoen 4s don't support iBeacon, but different devices on different iOS Versions using the ssame UUID? Could it bee that the Pi/plugin do something wrong in identifying the devices?

I hope you can shed some light on this. BTW: How do you identify your iOS devices form what is shown in the piBeacon list?
Thanks
Wilhelm

Wilhelm,
here my take:
1. iPhone 4s I believe does not do BLE
2. UUID are not unique on purpose!! they are used to transmit advertising beacons for shops etc. all beacons in a shop can have theUUID!!, MAC numbers are unique
That was the easy part..

There are 2 ways piBeacon supports detection of phones:
1. BLEconnect: the RPI will try to actively ping the phone through BLE . The phone has to be ready top accept requests. It is not enough to just enable BLE. You have to pair it with something, so that the next time the phone will be listening to requests.Iif not paired they do not listen to incoming BLE requests. This works ~ 90% reliable as the phones sometimes go into power sleep mode.
2. make the phone transmit iBeacon signals. You can use one of the many apps for this. They have to stay open (background is ok) to transmit the signal. BUT the IPHONE changes the mac address for these signals every time you start the app (there goes my statement that MC numbers are unique..). For that piBeacon has the feature of mapping an UUID to a name. It will use the UUID instead of the MAC number to id the device.

Please also check the detailed discussions in the piBeacon sections.

hope that helps.

BUT THE BEST SOLUTION are iBEACONS they work 100%, very fast, batteries last a long time,..

Karl

Hi Karl,

thanks for trying to help but maybe I don't understand the concept of iBeacons at all.
In essence you are saying, I have to carry arround an iBeacon to get detected by my house?

An I really missing the point here?
Cheeers
Wilhelm

The pibeacon does several things
1 detect ibeacon signals and similar. It is very fast and reliable. Xy beacons are the best right now. I can bring you one in mid feb if you like I will be in Frankfurt and Berlin.
iPhone can be made to send ibeacon signals. It is not sending them by default. You need to use an app for this
2. Pibeacon can ping a BLE device. if it answers it can be detected

In addition you can connect sensors (temp pressure distance contact analog. And relays )

In general phones are not a good tool to do presence detection in a reliable way. They go to sleep to save energy
If you are ok with slow reaction times (10 minutes for away) you should be ok
You can have apps running that send out signals but they draw down the battery That's why they are not widely used.
Again ibeacons are small have a single purpose and do it well
Send a simple signal every 0.x seconds at ~-59 dBm

Karl


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Thanks, but if that is as you describe, I think iBeacons are not what I was looking for.
At the moment, I do the presence detection using Geofency using a webhook.
While this works great, I was searching for a solution that would not need any configuration or app on the iPhones. As I see now, I can detect the presence of an iOS device but the UUID is NOT unique on those devices so they are not distinguishable. Bad luck. BTW I did not find any app on the German appstore that would transmit iBeacon running in background.

Cheers
Wilhelm

try light blue, blender beacon ... most of them have a hidden feature that makes them send beacon signals ..

you still can use the BLEconnect feature .. user hackencrash is using it .

the not unique UUID not unique is not an issue as the key is the MAC number - you can see the mac number of your iPhone (ip and BLE)in settings/ general/ about

Karl

I suppose you are not refering to the light blue photo app?
Blender beacon is not on the German app store as well.
LightBlue Explorer is the only one I can find, there is no option to transmit an iBeacon.

How does bleconnect feature work?
Do I have to create a device in Indigo manually? What MAC adress should it have? A unique one for the Pi or the MAC address of the bluetooth device I want to detect?

Sorry, more questions...

Wilhelm

BLE connect:
create a device pibeacon/BLEconnect enter the BLE MAC number (is almost the same as the IP MAC #) you find on the iPhone :settings/general/about
and define which RPI should track the phone

Screen Shot 2017-02-05 at 12.08.29.png (86.2 KiB) Viewed 2590 times

as for the beacon transmitter apps try:
beacon bits
Locate
estimote
dartle

Karl

Thank you very much. I will test it.
Cheers
Wilhelm

Hi Wilhelm,

Try Smartphone Radar. I don't have an Airport, but my wifi router supports logging, and I was able to make it detect the presence of 3 iPhones by seeing if they connect to wifi.

I use this to turn on a couple lights in the house when we arrive after dark. It generally works well, but because the iPhone does tend to go into low power mode, even when plugged in for charging. That makes it disconnect from wifi. Then, it will reconnect when checking for email or something similar, so then it thinks that someone comes home in the middle of the night and turns on a light. This can be somewhat mitigated by increasing a timeout counter to wait x number of minutes for when the phone has left the network before declaring that a phone is not home.

Some others use the Apple Homekit geolocation to varying degrees of success. viewtopic.php?f=191&t=16970&p=125029&hilit=Smartphone+radar#p125029

I don't believe that there is a perfect system to detect that you are home by solely using the iPhone. This is a result of the iPhone going into low power modes, but perhaps a combination of methods might cover you for most cases.


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Try fingscan. It has a link to Ifind and has the timers build in if you want to take the ip route.


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