IRK and Identity MAC for iPhone without MacOS

41

Yes, that might be it, as usually iPhones and iPad broadcast a one octet longer manufacturerdata.

"manufacturerdata": "4c0010063f1e89581c3b",
vs.
"manufacturerdata": "4c001005311860d2f2",

I’m wondering if some service(s) is/are deactivated through Family Sharing, and if that might be causing it.

As you’re likely only using the BLE device tracker functionality, or possibly only the presence messages distance property, it shouldn’t really matter, as you can re-label it in HA, but it’d still be ineresting to find out what might be causing this.

1 Like
42

What else would be possible? I thought presence and distance is all we can get!?

43

My wife´s iPhone12 is working, too.

Now we have 3 running Apple devices for presence detection.

Is it some how possible, to use Home Assistant MQTT Room presence for the Apple devices? The configuration needs a MAC…

44

Theengs Gateway is only really designed to detect Apple devices as BLE device trackers with general Home/Away presence detection.

You could use its presence option so that all devices additionally get published under a presence topic with their distance, calculated from the rssi strength. AFAIK these presence topic messages are being used by some HA room presence implementations, but this would mean you’d have to have a RaspberryPi with Theengs Gateway installed in every room.

Something running on ESP32s in every room would likely be much easier. ESPresense comes to mind there, but I do not have any personal experience with it.

45

Perhaps i found a dirty way to fit this - Theengs and ESPresense - together.
It´s really simple in HA - an automation listen to a presence topic of a device in theengs and is publishing a new topic with the needed payload structure to the espresence topic. There are just two values i changed in the new JSON - RSSI and Distance.

The absent message is my last piece in the puzzle…

But it´s working - the presence from theengs is recognized as room in MQTT Rooms (HA).

EDIT: This hack is only working with HomeAssistant - MQTT Rooms, but you could make it much more userfriendly - only set an option to publish it to espresense structure.

46

I have to admit I don’t quite follow everything above, as I do not have any experience with neither ESPresense nor Home Assistant’s MQQT Rooms :wink:

I’m glad to hear though that you have it working of you by combining these with Theengs Gateway.

With Theengs Gateway you should see the absent message though after the time set for

-to TIME_UNTIL, --tracker_timeout TIME_UNTIL
                        Seconds after which a discovered device tracker not being received is published as offline/away
                        (default: 120)

and if auto-discovered this should show as AWAY in the BLE device tracker UI in HA.