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.

Raspberry pi zero w home assistant