Hi, I'm sorry to revive such an old thread, but I had the same need as you guys for doing just this very thing: using BLE beacons for location and presence detection.

I made my own solution to it using an ESP8266 dev kit and a Nordic-based BLE module. You check out the project here: https://www.happybubbles.tech/presence/ where I have the beacon gateways for sale. But I've also made all the work open-source and open-hardware as well. I hope this helps you guys out if you're still looking for something like it.

Hi everyone,

First time posting here, I made a project you guys might be interested in. It's a little easy-to-use Wifi-enabled RFID reader. It's based on the ESP8266 and what it lets you do is connect it to your home wifi, then when you press a tag to its RFID reader, it sends the tag's ID as an HTTP POST request to any URL you want. The data is sent over JSON.

I've put the source code up here: https://github.com/happy-bubbles/nfc and it's pretty easy to set up and use if you're familiar with the ESP8266. I designed it to work best with the NodeMCU kit and the cheapo MFRC522 RFID modules.
My build is pretty ghetto and looks like this: http://imgur.com/CHT4nzz
That fancy case was the former home of my son's bottle-nipples. I'm sure you guys can make it look much better than I have.
If there's enough interest, I could design a PCB for this thing so it could be neater.

Anyway, I hope it's useful to some of you. Thanks for looking!

My advice would be to visit Alibaba and try to find someone who sells the product most similar to what you want. Then reach out to them about modifying it and branding it for you.
Some sell iBeacons and such in wristbands already, so it might not be too big of a stretch for them to customize it with some other electronics that you might have in mind.

Good luck!

Qu3Uk,

I did get a chance to test with a Fitbit recently. It technically worked, but not all that well. The thing is, the Fitbit only advertises every 2 seconds so latency is a bit high. But worse, its apps really want to be connected to it often to sync; and whenever it's connected, it stops advertising and the detector then can't pick it up.

TommySharp,

At this point I don't plan to modify the board much but having it read environmental sensors would be a cool feature!

For that, would be nice to make little beacons that read sensors and advertise/broadcast the readings every few seconds. Then they could be very low-power, run on coin-cells for months, and could be placed anywhere instead of needing it to be hooked up to USB power like the main board is. Like these: https://sen.se/peanuts/ I'm curious if it could read them.

As for enclosures, I know. I would love to have some nice ones but at this point I'm making too many boards to 3D print enclosures, but too few to afford injection-molding tooling to make a custom case.

@bisschopsr Yea I understand about the carrying smartphone everywhere, but my product just won't work super-accurately with it because of the limitations of the BLE peripheral mode of the phones. Unfortunately there's not much I can do about it.

Great question about power usage, it forced me to whip out my uCurrent Gold and measure the consumption. You can see it here: http://i.imgur.com/qvKXjsT.png sorry I tried to upload with the forum, but it kept giving me a 405 error about adding images, not sure why it's not working.

Anyway, it's set to 1mA per 1mV measured so you can see from the image that on average it uses about 150mA at 5V source. So depending on how long you want to run it, you'd need to size your battery for that. I just power them with a USB charger but you can just as easily use any ol' USB phone charging power bank thing. That's what's nice about just having the micro-USB port on there.

@Gary-Frantz

First, thanks for your order! There are many vendors of beacons and I'm still evaluating some to sell on the site that would work well with the presence detectors. The one you linked to looks like it could probably work, but I would recommend a beacon you could adjust settings on, like its transmission interval, power level, etc. So for that I would recommend ones that can act as configurable iBeacons. This one here looks alright: https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Broadcasting-Near-field-Positioning-replaceable/dp/B010Q2PUGA/

The ones I've bought some samples of and like quite a bit are these: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Bluetooth-nRF51822-iBeacon-Protable-UFO-Beacon_60377700306.html and I'll soon put them up on my store. They're the ones I've been shipping as part of the 4-pack on the site. They're quite nice and small with good RF and battery life. I wish they sold them on Aliexpress or someplace like that.

On my Nexus 5x it will advertise pretty well using Nordic's nrf connect app emulating a beacon, but it does still sometimes pause, you're right.

To be honest, this product was primarily developed to work with the small coin cell powered beacons. People in the home automation space already have a number of solutions available to track location with phones. But some people didn't want to use a big, expensive phone for everything they want to track, like small children, pets, or if they simply didn't want to carry their phone around with them everywhere in the house.

@gyro Sure, anything is possible, right? I think it could use an nrf24l01+ but the reason I chose BLE was because most common and user-friendly beacons have BLE rather than nrf24 chips inside them, same with most phones.

However if you choose to make a BLE beacon using the links you provided with an nrf24l01+, the Happy Bubbles detector should be able to detect it just fine, if you want to make your own beacon that way.

The thing is, this unit doesn't really broadcast out as a beacon, it instead listens for those broadcasts. I'm not sure that's possible to do with the nrf24l01+ right now.

Hek,

Yes, I do. I mainly use it to detect who is in what rooms and track down things my very young son likes to hide, like the TV remote!

While I do use my Nexus 5X phone sometimes to simulate an iBeacon to keep track of it, I don't always carry the big phone around. So this project was designed to work with small, cheap beacons like Estimotes, but it can also use anything that advertises itself over BLE. Like a Fitbit that someone would carry around on their person anyway could be used for the presence detection.

It doesn't rely on the phone scanning for beacons, so that makes it more reliable and lower latency.

It's a bit like the inverse of normal beacons, which stay in one place and your phone scans for them to detect them. Instead, this device stays in one place and detects beacons that are carried and moved around. I hope that makes sense.

My advice would be to visit Alibaba and try to find someone who sells the product most similar to what you want. Then reach out to them about modifying it and branding it for you.
Some sell iBeacons and such in wristbands already, so it might not be too big of a stretch for them to customize it with some other electronics that you might have in mind.

Good luck!

Hi, I'm sorry to revive such an old thread, but I had the same need as you guys for doing just this very thing: using BLE beacons for location and presence detection.

I made my own solution to it using an ESP8266 dev kit and a Nordic-based BLE module. You check out the project here: https://www.happybubbles.tech/presence/ where I have the beacon gateways for sale. But I've also made all the work open-source and open-hardware as well. I hope this helps you guys out if you're still looking for something like it.

Thanks Gregl! Right now I like using it with my Chromecast. On my server, I have a little script where I can associate Youtube videos to tag ID's. So when I press one, that Youtube video associated with that tag is sent right to Chromecast and begins playing. When my son is a little older, I can stick the tags on toys and books so when he touches them to the thing, it could play his favourite videos associated with those objects too.

I also have a client whose office is really into ping-pong and I'll make one for them soon. Maybe they can use it to keep score or something. They already made a little web-app for that.

I've added the schematic and PCB layout for the project here: https://github.com/happy-bubbles/nfc/tree/master/hardware_files