Checking presence of devices by using bluetooth MAC-address (hcitool)

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Hi there,

Because my mobile Apple devices disconnect wifi every x minutes, I’ve been looking for other options to detect my presence and let pimatic turn on some lights.

I thought about using l2ping to bluetooth-ping for my device, but reversed lookup by MAC-address is much faster.

On my raspberry pi, I did the following:

1. install hcitool (I think it’s part of the bluez package).
2. then hcitool scan to scan for usable bluetooth devices connected
3. and hciconfig hci0 up to get it running.

Probably not the most elegant option, but I have added a new device to my pimatic config.json:

{
  "id": "bt_thuis_lex",
  "name": "Lex home",
  "class": "ShellSwitch",
  "onCommand": "echo on",
  "offCommand": "echo off",
  "getStateCommand": "if hcitool name AA:BB:CC:DD:CC:BB |grep -q iPhone_lxz; then echo on; else echo off; fi",
  "interval": 6000
}

@lxz: Just my two cents: Wouldn’t it be good enough to allow some grace time for the Wifi presence check, e.g. “If the device has not been reachable for three minutes it is absent”. This way you could save energy by leaving Bluetooth off (even though Bluetooth 4 requires less energy than previous versions).

What are you trying to achieve? Do you need to detect absence instantly?

My bluetooth is already on because of my sportband (and my carkit too) and I was wondering if using bt for presence detection could work. And it does, which is all I wanted to achieve

You got a point: I don’t need pimatic to detect my absence instantly. But maybe someone else does.