I’ve been thinking about home automation a bit recently, and I realized that what I want as a big part of a system is some sort of generic presence-system. I’m imagining something along the lines of:
- Small/cheap nodes that can be plugged in around a house/space
- The nodes would form a mesh and talk to each other
- Nodes would determine the strength of a signal (Bluetooth LE?) and “discuss” it amongst each other to determine which one you’re closest to, and thus roughly “where” you are (triangulate your location based on signal strengths)
- Nodes would all connect to a server/service (could be locally-hosted), where they would broadcast your current location somehow. Maybe something like a Socket.IO server, so that other services could connect and receive live updates of location changes?
I wonder if this could be hacked together from iBeacons somehow, or if it’s too much the reverse of what they’re intended for? Does this already exist? Is there a better/simpler solution already available?
I’ve been wondering about something like this ever since I saw http://beaconsandwich.com. I wonder if Matt’s working on it yet? 🙂
That actually looks perfect! Time to go shopping!
Still hung up on the fact that your old Applescript didn’t work because there was nowhere in your house that was far enough for you to lose signal and lock your laptop for you? 😉
If only that thing had fired less false-positives, I’d still be using it 🙂
The company where I was working last year acquired an iBeacons startup this past summer, and basically what they were doing is what you are asking for, but for identifying customer walking paths inside stores. So yeah, it’s possible to do it with beacons … but I’m not sure if you are going to find something already done, and less anything open source… I would say you will need to end coding your own solution.