171–180 of 221 posts
I'm wondering how accurate this might prove measuring automobile traffic on a relatively busy street? I've been pondering some way to track the number of vehicles that pass my house each day, and would like (but not ideal) to get their average speed too. Was thinking about computer vision, and even audio doppler approaches, but this seems simpler - if only the bluetooth sensing might work on a device moving at 50mph+…
> not losing momentum in a nerd snipe like this is CRITICAL This line got me laughing! My nerd brain has tried so many times to convince me to splurge money with this exact line!
Of course the dramatic shift from "what do I feel like doing today" to "what am I in the mood for / have time for this season" has a lot to do with me being older and having children now, but with such huge gaps between me being willing/able to do such projects, losing momentum could mean coming back to something an entire year later, if ever.
I started an electronics project, at least 10 years ago now. It's "infamous" in my family, particularly when my wife needs something to poke at with my projects, for being the project I started over a decade ago, spent a tidy sum on, and am still adamant I will finish one day!
Exactly. I always had a habit of turning BT off, hoping to conserve the battery. And then our security department advises it - if you don't use it at the moment, turn it off. For security reasons. Flaws in BT sometimes come up and good if a user can get that update.
Outstanding write-up! We actually built a business based on this technology (occuspace.io) and have had to address almost all the questions that you brought up. To answer some of them here: Q: How accurate is BLE beacon count, as a proxy for occupancy? A: It's very highly correlated but different dining locations, classrooms and library floors have very different correlation factors. Consider using other, perhaps mor…
I'm wondering how accurate this might prove measuring automobile traffic on a relatively busy street? I've been pondering some way to track the number of vehicles that pass my house each day, and would like (but not ideal) to get their average speed too. Was thinking about computer vision, and even audio doppler approaches, but this seems simpler - if only the bluetooth sensing might work on a device moving at 50mph+…
Mount this with a usb cable somewhere, add an ESP32 or anything with Bluetooth somewhere else to accumulate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to say, my manual solution was a lot more fun and hands-on and let me learn a lot more skills (C++, Grafana, serverless) than a one-click solution. Though I will be prioritizing maintainability if I decide to go further with it!
Agree with you fully. It's also a lot more easy to program behavior into an esp32 rather than rely on home assistant pre defined modules.
But yeah it is more fun to do it bare bones :). However, over time I found myself "upgrading" my hand made IoT devices to more standard solutions. Standard solutions usually work better.
Since this was done by a student at a university, and at some level this involves tracking people, that's an opportunity to ask a professor about what human subjects protocols you'd need if this was research. (A professor might be easier to ask than the university human subjects board -- who might refuse to talk with you because this isn't under their jurisdiction, or might get alarmed because you didn't talk with th…
I wonder what the "rules" are for things like tracking beacons. They're being broadcast, and they're almost certainly collected without consent everywhere we go. I happen to live at a junction where my home is regularly surrounded by large numbers of Bluetooth devices; I had considered setting up a BLE tracker purely for "fun" to see what I could collect and discern from the data. For example, one thing I'm certain o…
> Location marketing aims to understand “online-offline attribution.” If a Starbucks coffee ad is sent to your email, for example, marketers want to know if you actually went there and bought a coffee. The only way to know is to monitor your online and offline habits at all times.
> Beacons are also being used for smart cities initiatives. The location company Gimbal provided beacons for LinkNYC kiosks that provoked privacy concerns about tracking passers-by. Beacon initiatives have been started in other cities, including Amsterdam (in partnership with Google), London and Norwich.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231027211008/https://www.nytim...
It's the wild west. We're illegally surveilled every day and the government uses the same data in product that allow them to track people without warrants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Reveal
There are no "rules" against receiving a signal. All you need is a radio that can pick them up. The rules apply to those broadcasting things afaik
> but some don't carry any devices at all (or keep Bluetooth off on their phone). Exactly. I always had a habit of turning BT off, hoping to conserve the battery. And then our security department advises it - if you don't use it at the moment, turn it off. For security reasons. Flaws in BT sometimes come up and good if a user can get that update.
> Linux Bluetooth is incredibly painful to handle in a headless way. Binding to DBus requires cross-compiler magic and not even Cross was getting me out of it. That was my experience as well. I was doing something different so ultimately I just decided I'd put both the devices on the same WiFi network and then scan for "pi.local". Do wish I knew how all those other crates work though where it crashes at runtime if yo…
https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/homeassistan...
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/bluetooth_tracker...
Outstanding write-up! We actually built a business based on this technology (occuspace.io) and have had to address almost all the questions that you brought up. To answer some of them here: Q: How accurate is BLE beacon count, as a proxy for occupancy? A: It's very highly correlated but different dining locations, classrooms and library floors have very different correlation factors. Consider using other, perhaps mor…
Does this type of occupancy tracking work accurately outdoors? I'm assuming it would be difficult because signals would travel further. (My startup needs occupancy tracking for tennis courts.) Maybe I could mount a BT device at a corner of the outdoor space and use its signal strength as the threshold value.
UWB in particular is accurate enough to get breathing patterns...