iBeacons

I am thrilled with the functionality that is being added to roomie. i see that iBeacons support is experimental and that an iOS device can be used as a beacon, but will you support other beacon manufacturers? I purchased five for just this reason, location based triggers for automation. I got them from geohopper they are called bleu stations and they have a companion app called bleu setup to set output power and name them. They could be named room by room to have roomie trigger lights etc. do you have any plans along these lines?

thanks for a great product.

There isn’t any technical reason why this would not work today, we just haven’t tested any of them. Because Roomie converts any iOS device into an iBeacon, that is something we feel comfortable releasing now.

At a technical level, the iBeacon UUID advertisement from Roomie is very simple. The UUID is the same as the random home UUID of your Roomie configuration – you can see this in the Contact Support email template for instance. The major is the room number plus 1, or 0 if no room advertisement. The room number refers to the room by index as listed in the rooms list. The minor shouldn’t be needed for a stationary iBeacon. If your third party iBeacons are configurable, in principle that should work now.

Thank you.

Ok that’s great and I can’t wait to mess around with this. I am going to send a Contact support email, can you please tell me what UUID number I would type in my iBeacons as they are configurable. Thanks a lot. Matt

If you tap “Contact Support” inside Roomie, the email that appears gives you your unique UUID labelled “ID”. That needs to be set as the broadcast UUID for any external third-party iBeacon.

Thank you.

Very exiting new feature indeed ! Big thumbs up for Roomie.
What would be the cheapest option to buy some (~3) beacons ?
Can anybody recommend some options ?

I played around with this last night, using an iPhone 4S as the iBeacon, and then my iPhone 5S as the roaming device. When I walked close to the 4S, nothing turned on, even though I had an Entry Activity set. If I went back into Settings, I could watch the distance decrease and change from red to gray as I got closer to the 4S. I expected that when it changed to gray, thay was the trigger for the activity. But nothing.

Any thoughts on what I’m doing wrong?

Also, is there any delay setting (kind of like an occupancy sensor has), so that, for instance, if I leave to go to the bathroom and then I come back, it doesn’t turn everything off and then turn everything back on when I return?

Perhaps a video tutorial would be helpful, or maybe even a setup FAQ

Red = Too Far Away
Gray = Near, candidate for Current Room
White = Near, Current Room

The iPhone 5S seems to have some issues related to iBeacon. That’s actually the primary reason we have stated that this feature requires iOS 7.1. So we’d recommend removing that hardware from any testing of this for now.

There are several built-in thresholds to prevent redundancy of commands. We’ll likely add some tunable parameters over time based on feedback.

A FAQ on this whole area will be posted after iOS 7.1 is available and we have verified that any known issues have been resolved by that.

Thank you.

I’m really hoping Apple sees fit to let you turn on an iBeacon service in a 3G ATV. The hardware is capable, and this would be a very cheap and easy way to add iBeacon support to a room that already has an ATV. Also hoping support is ironed out so nicely in 7.1 that these start rolling out en masse and get a lot cheaper if you have to buy actual devices.

 

 

–Donnie

Quick question when using beacons, do both devices need to have roomie open for it to work?

Or just the device executing an activity for example.

The way Apple has implemented iBeacons for now requires both sides are running the relevant app.

We think that is… some kind of oversight. Regardless, we’re keeping an eye on that issue and we have a good future solution in case Apple decides to keep it that way. It seems to us that Apple is likely to fix that. iBeacon is sort of like CarPlay, it’s something that Apple is continuing to refine.

Advertising a Room can be done via external iBeacon transmitters, so that would generally setup either via a dedicated room based iOS device (“this is the Family Room iPad”) or a dedicated transmitter.

Advertising a Device though is where you may want the advertisement to happen in the background. You could attach a physical iBeacon to your car, but in general things that move are not also running an app and unlocked. So right now it works for the Apple Store app because you walk around the Apple Store with your device in your hand and their app running, but Apple doesn’t broadcast the advertisement if an app is closed – even though iOS actually does broadcast BLE advertisements with apps closed, just not yet iBeacons. (An example of that is the Kevo lock which uses BLE proximity and works with the app closed, but is not based directly on iBeacons.)

Anyway, again we have a good solution if Apple decides not to improve iBeacons in that direction, but we do consider that a bug in iOS at this point.

Thank you.

Hey guys. Quick question on this front. Is the proximity feature only going to work on devices that support Bluetooth 4.0 BLE? So older iPads, for example, won’t be supported? And only newer ones would? Just trying to understand the limitations. We have some iPads in our rooms we were hoping to use as broadcasters. One room has an iPad 2, the other an iPad 3.

Thanks!

Yes, iBeacon is based on Bluetooth BLE. That means it requires an iPhone 4S, iPad 3 (March 2012), or iPod Touch 5 (2012) or greater in each case of course.

Note that our previous message was also written prior to testing iOS 7.1. There is some indication that iOS 7.1 may have made some improvements in this area.

Thank you.

Looks like i got my wish, been reading articles saying apps in 7.1 no longer have to be open for ibeacons.

This is an idea out of left field, but can Apple TVs running 6.1, which is similar to iOS 7.1, act as beacons? That is something we have in most rooms of the house, and would be great if we could use those as beacons trigger the auto-selection of rooms within Roomie.

Keep up the great work guys!

Im not sure if the roomie team has had time to test ios 7.1 but im curious to what end from my previous question would require apps to be open.

 

My goal and hope would be neither device would need to have roomie actually open to work, but i dont know if that would be possible.

Roomie 2.2 is now available and adds the ability to use the default Estimote beacon. Explaining to users how to reconfigure Estimotes with a special beacon ID was quite an involved process, and in general there is no real issue with using a shared beacon these days until such time as your neighbors in the next apartment start using Estimotes as well – by which time it will likely be easier to configure hardware iBeacons.

We’ve also fixed a few other issues with Proximity Automation in 2.2 and now feel this feature is ready for real usage.

Thank you.

Are there directions on using the Estimote iBeacon hardware with Roomie. I see the option in the settings but don’t know how to implement 3 different Estimotes in three different rooms such that Roomie on my iPhone/iPad knows to switch to that room upon me entering it.

Thanks,

Rob

The new Proximity FAQ has just been posted that includes instructions on setting up Estimotes:

roomieremote.com/faq/#proximity

Thank you.

So, I’ve gotten the proximity stuff to work. I have no lights that are integrated, so for now, I’m just “Watching TiVo” when entering the family room and “Power Off”-ing when I exit. That seems to work, as long as, like Roomie suggests above, bothe the iPhone 4S I’m using as a beacon and the iPhone 5s I have in my pocket are open and running Roomie in the foreground (sorry, Ghost, but it doesn’t seem like the background thing works right now).

The REALLY cool thing, it seems to me, would be to be able to do something like:

  • On enter for more than 15 seconds, “Watch TiVo” - the 15 seconds would be so that if I’m just walking THROUGH the room, nothing happens.

  • On exit, pause (so I can go get a beer or use the restroom without turning everything off)

  • On exit for more than 5 minutes, “System Off”

Obviously, for this use case to work, some kind of timer would have to be incorporated, and would have to be available to the user for customization. Any suggestions?

I got Roomie 2.2 to work with my iBeacons today! Very cool! The one thing I was a little disappointed by is how long it takes for Roomie to figure out I have switched rooms. Can this be sped up by changing the refresh intervals on the iBeacons? Right now I have it set to their default refresh/broadcast rate.

Thanks!