BalenaLocating Dashboard

Product support
1

Hi all,
I am using the sample following as https://www.balena.io/blog/tracking-bluetooth-beacons-with-a-raspberry-pi. But when I used the BalenaLocating Dashboard option so I could not find my iBeacon as

Where’s my stuff?

Here’s a list of the iBeacons I’ve found:
Not data to show, yet…
Please help me to do next which I can add my iBeacon for this case.

5

Hey Tony, just to be sure you did add some beacon or fake beacons(by using an android/iOS app)? and are they near the PI’s reception area?

7

Hi there,

It’s great to see that you’re trying the project!

Can you tell me more about the iBeacon you are using? Can you find it with a BLE Scanner app on your phone? Could you tell me the UUID (unique identifier) of the beacon?

If you can find it with a phone, and it’s definitely using the iBeacon standard, could you please make sure it’s close to the Raspberry Pi running balenaLocating. There is an environment variable you can set called RSSI_THRESHOLD which determines how strong/weak a signal from a beacon that will be added to the database, it’s documented here: https://github.com/balenalabs-incubator/balena-locating#configure
Similarly you can set the DEBUG variable to true and the project will log more, and tell you if your beacon is being ignored for some reason.

Let me know how you get on!
Phil

10

Unfortunately I appear to be having the same issue.

I have run Beacon Simulator on my phone, and tested it with the Beacon Scanner on another phone, and it finds it correctly.

However the BalenaLocating Dashboard never shows any tags.

I have turned DEBUG on, but the only entry for the beaconService is “Started to scan.” and nothing else. The UUID of the iBeacon is e04e82c5-afd0-49b8-95bc-e92e4c50d620

I am running on a brand new Raspberry Pi 4.

11

Hi

Can you share a screenshot of what you see wrt the said device in the Nordic Connect app?


You can use a similar app, as long as we get to this as much details as possible.
12

This info can potentially help us to create a clone of the beacon device on a smartphone app, and debug its detection locally with BLE on a Pi4

14

I have the sam problem. I use the Beacon simulator on Android. When I create a IBeacon, Balena doesn’t see it. When I create an Eddystone-beacon, Balena sees it.

17

Hi Jo,

Could you please set the environment variable DEBUG to true and make sure the Android device is close to the balena device when testing. Also check that the power output of the simulated iBeacon is higher than -75dBm. The debug option should give us some logging if there is an issue with the iBeacon formatting.

Phil

19

I bought Bluetooth nRF51822 iBeacon and the BalenaLocating Dashboard picks them up. The only problem now is that the beacons were delivered without password. They all show up with the same UUID, but that’s not Balena’s fault.

EDIT: By using the app NRF connect, I logged into the beacon and changed the Minor / Major values. The beacons now show up as seperat beacons in Balena.

21

The standard password for these nrf51822-beacons is AA14061112, by the way.