Beacon: a Geohopper/Beecon plugin

[howartp]

Very impressed with this plugin.

Installed Geofency app and Beacon plugin and got it all up and running (including port-forwarding) in about 15 minutes. I already had a DynDNS account, so I didn't have to worry about internal/external server names.

Just drove from Home (geofence) to Church (geofence) with Geofency force-closed and Indigo open on the Devices folder showing my Beacons - and by the time I had pulled the handbrake on in the Church car park, Indigo was showing me Present at Church. The same happened on the return journey as well.

Peter

[howartp]

Maybe I spoke too soon.

At this moment in time, I am both at home and at Church, 2 miles up the road, according to the Geofency map.

[Bollar]

It seems like Beacon devices can't be used in Virtual Device Groups. Seems like this would be an ideal application (e.g., flag if everyone is home, or not at home). Is there a reason Beacon can't be used (like Indigo doesn't recognize Present/Absent as True/False indicators?

[jay (support)]

If the beacon device presented by this plugin implemented an On/Off state (like motion/door sensors for instance) then they would work. Device groups (which I think is what you mean) need some known functionality to determine how to make the device work in the group. So we chose to use the On/Off state since it was the most logical choice. A device must support an On/Off state so we can use that to determine the device group's state.

[howartp]

If the beacon device presented by this plugin implemented an On/Off state...

Out of interest, can a state be defined as on/off Boolean in this way, but still have custom names?

So with this plugin a device is either 'present' or 'absent' - can these be custom labels for an on/off, or does it have to use one of the three defined on/true/1 pairs?

[jay (support)]

Currently, a state can be defined as boolean but have arbitrary values (we don't yet do type checking when you set a state value I don't believe).

In order for one of these plugin devices to be use in a Device Group, the device must be one of:

• indigo.dimmer
• indigo.relay
• indigo.sensor and must have the onState property (i.e. have a state key of "onOffState")

[midd]

After disabling the plugin and reinstalling Geohopper onto my phone, Indigo now sees my phone and my wife's phone. My next step is to utilize the variables with Jay's advanced Thermostat scheduling. http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewtopic. ... 0394#30394

Basically what I want to do is after both phones have been absent for 20 minutes, I want to change the housemode variable to vacation so the HVAC won't run until one of our phones is inside the geofence.

[howartp]

Very impressed with this plugin.

Installed Geofency app and Beacon plugin and got it all up and running (including port-forwarding) in about 15 minutes. I already had a DynDNS account, so I didn't have to worry about internal/external server names.

Just drove from Home (geofence) to Church (geofence) with Geofency force-closed and Indigo open on the Devices folder showing my Beacons - and by the time I had pulled the handbrake on in the Church car park, Indigo was showing me Present at Church. The same happened on the return journey as well.

Peter

Maybe I spoke too soon.

At this moment in time, I am both at home and at Church, 2 miles up the road, according to the Geofency map.

Further to my own posts above, I've found that any app that uses iOS's own location suffers the same problem - when I'm on 3G/4G, my location in iOS Maps is of a sufficiently large radius that it often overlaps my house radius, even though it's 5 minutes up the road. GeoFency and IFTTT both then tell me the same inaccurate location info.

When I'm on wifi in either location, my location is accurate to a few feet and works very well with GeoFency. The problem comes when I am on 3G/4G and it can't locate me accurately enough.

I've just ordered 5 USB RadBeacon's from Radius Networks, as well as their MacBeacon software, so I can setup 6 iBeacons in GeoFency and use those - both my cars have USB ports which should provide power to the Beacons in the cars, and I have a PC at home, church and work that are permanently on, in addition to the Mac.

The Beacon plugin itself works absolutely fine with GeoFency, it's just the iOS problem of accurate location.

[howartp]

RadBeacons arrived today (3 day delivery from USA to UK - impressive!).

Working great so far - installed in mine and Dads cars at teatime, before we both drove 45 minutes to a social event.

I arrived before him so stood at the entrance to the car park.

When I got home, I checked GeoFency - it had detected the RadBeacon in my dads car as he drove past me and remained connected for 1-1.5 minutes whilst he parked up!

RadBeacon Mac software allows you to configure the UUID, Major and Minor fields and transmit power, as well as name each one so you can identify each one when installed. Also set and lock a PIN so snoopers can't use the same software to hack the field data.

Peter

[ckeyes888]

Been using the Beacon plugin and Geohopper app for some time now without issue but
lately it's become flakey and now won't work at all. Even the tests from the Geohopper app won't come thru to Indigo.
I haven't changed a thing. I doubled check that the port is still open for the webservice.
Both our iPhones are running 8.4.1
Beacon 0.95
Indigo 6.0.20

Anyone else seeing any issues?

Thanks,

Carl

Anyone else having any issues

[gskarp]

Any chance your ISP changed your IP address. That happened to me.

[ckeyes888]

Thanks but I use a dns service to keep it current. Tried a different port and reloading the app but no joy.

edit: Maybe some other way to test the webservice?

Carl

[howartp]

Yes, I've had problems with Beacon recently. Disabling and re-enabling the plugin sorts it out, but it goes wrong again at some point.


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[ckeyes888]

Thanks, but I tried that as well.

Carl

[howartp]

Should have said, I use GeoFency not GeoHopper, but for me reloading the Beacon plugin sorts it.

I don't use triggers on location yet so I don't notice very quickly when it goes, to try and trace it.


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