Just looking for Ideas.. Tile locators?

After having lost my entire wallet and spending the last 2 weeks replacing Licenses, debit and credit cards etc. I decided to go ahead order a couple Tile locators for my wallet and keys. Problem (hopefully) solved.

Next question, has anyone found a way to use them in their HA setup? If so, what are you doing and how?

I have a few of these but never found a reason to get their data into Hubitat. The Tile app does everything I need, which is normally just helping me find which pocket I left my wallet in around home. :smiley: (But it can do a bit more--I think there are options to let you know when it no longer sees a device, in real time?)

But as far as I know, Tile does not have an open API, so there's unlikely to be an official integration. Anything unofficial would have to be reverse-engineered. Home Assistant has one, and last I read, it worked by simulating the mobile app by doing reverse-engineered polling calls to the Tile cloud. Not sure if there are any direct Bluetooth options (though that definitely wouldn't work on Hubitat at the moment). Just something I haven't ever found a use for. Perhaps if you have a specific use case in mind, someone can suggest a workaround. Otherwise, this is all I know of.

Nope No specific use case in mind. More idle curiosity, More to see if anyone else had a use case, and maybe get me thinking how I might use it. Only thing I can think of off the top of my head is presence, but not sure how.
I wonder if they may open their API now that Life360 owns them ? I'm really kind of hoping that Life 360 will eventually include Tile locations in the Life360 app.

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Same here. They don’t make it particularly easy to integrate with in any substantial way, AFAIK. But that hasn’t mattered for me, it works fine for finding misplaced items around the house as-is.

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Could this be what you are after?

It's not the easiest thing to setup, and I haven't really got it working myself. The main problem I faced in the end was consistency in detecting that I was still home. A lot depends on the range of the bluetooth dongle you use and you may need more than one around the house and use a combination of the output from each one.

This is my current project in progress.
It does require couple extra devices (RPI and ESP32) but looks very attractive at the end.
My use case for this project - is to improve Auto Unlock reliability.

I came across ESpesence project. It based on ESP32 board (cheap and easy to install).
This tracker can detect many different BT Beacons an if you have multiple
devices installed it can precisely detect in which room each BT Beacon is.
For the beginning I am planning to use only one ESPesence ESP32.
All what I need for now - is to reliably detect family members arrival
(each person will have a little BT Beacon device on keychain).
The ESPresence interface is MQTT.
So, RPI with Home Assistance with MQTT Broker installed is required.
Installation and configuration of HA and MQTT Broker is a bit tricky but
also almost straight forward.
Finally Home Assistance Device Bridge (available from HPM, easy to
install and configure) needs to be installed on Hubitat.
Finally few little things needs to be done on HA:

  • Install a Virtual Presence Sensor;
  • Add little Automation for passing Presence Status to the HE.

Well, as of now I have a problem with Virtual Presence Sensor on the HA.
Sensor is installed and even could be toggled manually but it does not
work with Automation. I posted few questions on the HA forum but
unlike HE forum with near instant responses I did not get any
response at all from the HA forum.
This very last step (i did not expect any problems in this are) is not
yet working but I am sure, I will get it.

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So is the issue in toggling the presence sensor in HA, or telling HE that the presence has changed?

Yes.
Virtual Sensor is created. I can toggle it manually in HA.
HE immediately sees a change and correctly reported status.
But no matter what I tried, I cannot (yet) make this Virtual Sensor
to change its state by HA Automations.
If you have an idea what to do/change on the HA side to
get this working please let me know.
(HA forum is not responsive at all.)

Unfortunately I do not use HA, sorry.

Understand, no problem.
First, I did not expect problem in this area at all.
Second, I expected a response from HA community.
The fix should be very easy for the HA experts.
But, I did not get any response at all for already 3 days.

OK, finally I got the entire project working.

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Can you give a step-by-step instruction on what you did? I think many people would be interested in this

The OP question was how to track Tile Locators with HE.
My project is to create very reliable Arrival Detection but it actually can
precisely locate Active Beacons around the house.

This project requires additional hw/sw components:

For each involved hw and sw components please follow the correspondent
docs and instructions.

The steps are:

  1. Install and configure Home Assistant follow the instruction from the HA web site:
    Getting Started - Home Assistant

    • Add MQTT Mosquitto Broker Integration and configure it.
      MQTT Broker is required for communication with the ESPresence device.

    • Add Virtual Devices components:
      GitHub - twrecked/hass-virtual: Virtual Components for Home Assistant
      Virtual Presence Sensor on the HA is a component for interfacing with HE.

      Configure Virtual Presence Sensors (I have only one) but adding next
      lines to the configuration.yaml file (sensor name could be whatever you like):

binary_sensor:
  - platform: virtual
    name: 'Welcome Home Sensor'
    initial_value: 'off'
    class: presence
    initial_availability: true
Repeat this code for every Virtual Sensor if you need more than one.

Add entries for all you Beacon Devices in the same configuration.yaml file:

sensor:
  - platform: mqtt_room
    name: 'Beacon 1'
    device_id: 'iBeacon:Your actual Beacon ID1'
    state_topic: 'espresense/rooms'
    timeout: 20
    away_timeout: 180

  - platform: mqtt_room
    name: 'Beacon 2'
    device_id: 'iBeacon:Your actual Beacon ID1'
    state_topic: 'espresense/rooms'
    timeout: 20
    away_timeout: 180
  • Program and configure the ESP32 Development Board with the
    ESPresence firmware: https://espresense.com/

  • Install Home Assistant Device Bridge on the HE using HPM.
    This driver will bring in all Virtual Presence Sensors from HA to HE.

That is about it.

Finally add some automation to the HA for triggering Virtual Presence Sensor(s)
by using GUI or editing automations.yaml file:

- id: '1652741258583'
  alias: Welcome Home BT Trackers
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
    - sensor.beacon_1
    - sensor.beacon_2
    from: not_home
    to: corridor
  condition: []
  action:
  - service: virtual.turn_on
    data:
      entity_id: binary_sensor.virtual_welcome_home_sensor
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 5
      milliseconds: 0
  - service: virtual.turn_off
    data:
      entity_id: binary_sensor.virtual_welcome_home_sensor
  mode: single

In my case "Welcome Home Sensor" will be set to Home state for 5 sec
when any of the Beacon Devices will be detected as present.

HE will see the current status of the "Welcome Home Sensor".
Add whatever automation you need to the HE.
In my case the "Welcome Home Sensor" is a part of Auto Unlock logic.

Thank to this project finally Auto Unlock function became very reliable.

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Kudos for taking the time to spell out the steps you followed...

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