BC011 iBeacon

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.

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 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.

These beacons are perfect for my home automation project requiring precise location detection inside my home. I also had to reach out to customer service for a minor snafu that was immediately rectified. Amazon's fault not Blue Charm. The service was very personable. The email reply was almost immediate, by a real person, who genuinely seemed interested in my project. This company has that special something. I can't wait to test out more of their products.

Can't work it

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.

I tried to set up my beacon and really am not a tech person, it was super challenging.