BC011 iBeacon

So far, so good. Working well with Home Assistant and tracking if the dogs are in the home/yard. Exactly what I needed.

Configuration of this beacon is done via a generic android app. I reduced the beacon interval down to 4 seconds. Battery life is greater than a year. It's low profile, and I taped it to a paper card and put it in my wallet. In a pinch if I lose my wallet, I can use the app and scan for it and narrow down the room I lost my wallet in. No, it's not quite like a tile, but it works with open source projects like home assistant.

Using these with room assistant to track everything from water bottles to my AirPods. They take a few seconds to update but their ease of setup and configuration options, ability to lock down and replaceable battery means I’ll be using these for quiet some time.

I use these with ESPresense and Home Assistant in my home and business. In my business it turns lets the building know when one of my employees is there. Then Homeassistant turns on the lights and adjusts the thermostat. When everyone shows as gone homeassistant turns off any remaining lights and outlets ensuring no coffee pots, etc are left on over night. That functionality would not be possible without these little devices on my key employee's key chains.

I bought this beacon after consulting with the BlueCharm Beacon support folks (they responded within a couple of hours of my request) because I wanted to experiment with scanning for beacons from an iOS app using CoreBluetooth as opposed to the Beacon APIs in CoreLocation. Since iBeacons aren't normally detectable using CoreBluetooth, I needed a beacon that could advertise in other formats, such as Eddystone. I was able to successfully scan for Eddystone UID and TLM payloads (I'll provide BlueCharm with the details so you can likely ask them directly about this if you are interested). The suggested KBeacon iOS app worked flawlessly for configuring the beacon. I was able to use it to change the UID/TLM payloads and then see those custom values in the advertising data when scanning with CoreBluetooth! Throughout this, BlueCharm support was very helpful and responsive to all of my questions. Thanks again!

Works well for presence tracking. Default out-of-box configuration is good for basic use. The KBeacon configuration app has tons of useful settings including forcing "always on" and advertising TLV broadcasts for monitoring battery life / uptime. This device is essentially a rebadged lower cost device from China, but I support paying a bit extra for the convenience of Amazon and the small company that resells this.

Can't work it

There are a few reasons to buy a beacon (any beacon actually) from Blue Charm: 1). Not many companies make proximity beacons and sell them piecemeal to lowly consumers who just want 1 or 2 to use them to do weird geofencing projects at home. Most of these big guys like Estimote don't sell individual beacons anymore and they definitely stopped supporting them and updating their apps. There aren't many sellers of proximity beacons an amazon besides BlueCharm actually...or even on the general web. 2) They work. If you're not a techy person, learn the tech and if you're not getting the beacon to work.. It's probably user error. However, if you’re having trouble getting it setup, see #3. 3) This is the biggie. Customer support. I sent a question about a project I was doing (wanted the beacon to track and send webhooks when I was very close to it) and Thomas (the owner) responded within an hour with a very detailed answer. He even got invested in the project I was working on and gave me different scenarios to try that he tested himself for my unique case! Wow. Can't ask for more hands on customer service than that. I'm getting to the bottom of my problem and it's definitely not the hardware beacon itself...it's another software issue that Thomas himself helped me discover. Besides all of this, he's obviously invested in what he's doing and is a good engineer. Definitely the go to choice for buying beacons. Support BlueCharm.

Excellent product, install KBeacon app and you have the option to change the configure, much more options to configure than tile.