May I wish you and all 52k subscribers another wonderful year of Andreas Spiess videos. What a year it has been. Thank you Andreas, wonderfully inspiring and always, worth the time watch over and over again. Bless you for your kindness, hard work, precision and most of all for sharing and listening. Your my electronics Grandfather for sure.

Hi Andreas, thank you for all the great videos in the past year. They were not only quite useful and interesting, but also very inspiring. I know making these videos took a lot of time and appreciate the effort you take to keep them interesting for your viewers. I wish you and your family all the best for the next year!

Hi Andreas, I also wish you and all of your readers a happy New Year. Looking back, I realize how much I learned from your videos this last year! I am so grateful for that. Thanks!

Brilliant as usual! Well scripted and I like the way you changed the order to give those who aren't enthused by the details a chance to ring up a view for your channel and also it give the rest of us who love the details a tantalizing view of what's to come. I wish you a very prosperous and exciting New Year.

I think this starts to smell like a real new product. People detection combined with people recognition. Sounds like a alarm and home automation in one go. I need to look at this more closely. Thanks for all the great good hard work.

You have guided and helped us all hobbyists in 2017 brilliantly, 2018 will surely be more amazing with all the new cool videos and ideas. Happy New Year!

its always a pleasure to detect NEW FIELDS of application with your help and orientation. THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP to so many makers.

A number of years ago I did a lot of research and experimenting on this kind of proximity tracking. It was fun but frustrating, because a number of technologies get really close to creating a great experience, but there were always fatal flaws. The most success we had was with a very similar setup; we used small computers with Bluetooth 4.0 as tracking stations and recorded all the BLE advertisements received. We got a number of different fitness bands and such things (these were the first generation of FitBit and similar devices) and we had great success at measuring relative proximity. But we soon discovered that smart watches tended to either have MAC randomization (this is a capability of all BLE devices, but they don't all use it) enabled or wouldn't emit advertisements unless they were "awake". For a consumer device to track the owner's presence, it would really have to have its own "wearable" beacon and a pairing process that would allow paired trackers to recover the real MAC (this is also part of the BLE spec, I believe). More and more BLE devices will be un-trackable by a generic tracker due to either not transmitting advertisements all the time or using randomization--without randomizing, you could be tracked *anywhere* as your travel about, and that's a legitimate privacy concern that most companies are becoming wise to. For a home-use hobby tracking system, there are a number of things that could work: 1. Find, as you did, some sort of wearable that always emits advertisements and doesn't use MAC randomization. As long as it still works, you're good, but if you upgrade to a newer version it probably won't be as trackable. 2. Find a source of cheap "beacon" type BLE devices--these are designed to be tracked by unauthenticated devices, mostly so apps can use them for local positioning in a retail environment. Some of these are designed to run for a year or more of constant beacon transmission on a coin cell. You'll have to make a wearable out of one of these yourself, and it won't do anything useful aside from turning your light on! 3. Write or install a smartphone app that will turn your smartphone into a "beacon" emulator. These apps are usually meant to help "beacon" app developers to test their apps without a bunch of actual beacon devices by instructing the smartphone to emit the advertisements that a beacon would, which would then be detectable by your tracker device. You have to remember to keep the app running if you want to be tracked, though.

I've actually created a similar system with a RPi with a USB Bluetooth device and have been planning to move this over to a dedicated ESP32 for a little more stability. Great video as always!

Another fantastic step forward. I have enjoyed the journey with you over the last 12 months and wish you health and happiness for 2018.

All the best for 2018! Thanks for all your great video's this year, I look forward to them every week and they are a great inspiration!

I love all these Bluetooth videos. They've inspired me to try and put together a Bluetooth HID with an Esp32 to make a custom game controller. It's going to take awhile because it seems quite a bit more difficult than the heart rate monitor.

Thanks for Sunday morning video. Wish you a Happy New Year!

Thank you for the time and effort you put into your videos and projects. They are very useful and helpful !

I wish you happy new year! I have learned a lot from Andreas Spiess. Thank you for sharing your video.

Your videos and work is always brilliant, well done and look forward to an exciting 2018.

Thanks Andreas!... have a good year full of good health and several projects !

Thanks so much for this very informative video! Happy New Year to you too!

Superb. Thank you very much Mr. Swiss Accent. Happy new year from Indonesia.

Thank you Andreas and Happy New Year! Another great video. This is exactly what I was working on until I felt a little overwhelmed and then got side tracked. I bought 2 different iBeacons from Banggood a few months back and was experimenting with this exact process (but in reverse). I was programming an app that would constantly sniff for iBeacons with specific names. I managed to do that but then got tripped up in implementing an authentication system on the iBeacons so that it could send a safe command to the app like opening a web page. To achieve it that way, I would have to learn the Nordic NRF5xxx API and would require a Segger programmer which I purchased. This allows me to place the inexpensive iBeacons over a large region (my urban farm) without needing a network. Those little iBeacons (I'll leave a link) are very inexpensive and have up to 50 meters of range. If you only need a few feet of range then you have the capability to lessen the signal and save allot of battery power. They advertise that a beacon can last up to a year. These are the two iBeacons that I purchased: www.banggood.com/Estimote-Beacons-Type-Bluetooth-4_0-Module-NRF51822-Chipset-IBeacon-with-Silicon-Case-p-1103872.html?rmmds=search&cur_warehouse=CN and this one before I new the difference between chips: www.banggood.com/Bluetooth-Nordic-Ibeacon-Sticker-CC2640-Ibeacon-Beacon-Bluetooth-Beacon-with-Long-Range-p-1103871.html?rmmds=search&cur_warehouse=CN Have a great new year and please keep exploring this subject.

Hi Andreas (great channel) Only yesterday I learned some stuff about iBeacons (introduced in 2013). Some devices have sensonrs and transmit also some data. Great battery life. With 2032 coin cell battery, I think more than 1 year.

Happy new year and thank you so much for your videos and hard work.

Awesome video and excellent research. Thank you and have a very happy and productive new year, Andreas.

Happy new year to you too. Please do continue the good work.

Top of the top. Very usefull script and profetional presentation. Thank you . George from Athens Greece

Thanks Andreas very informative! Happy New year!

Thank you! This will become very useful for me. I might not upset my wife so much when forgetting about my shops lights.

You can theoretically covert ESP 32 to a Bluetooth sniffer by turning the wifi completely off. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Thank you for making my 2017 an IoT Year. Your videos inspired me to built lot of home automation projects (Got 20 + ESP boards already). Have Awesome new year and greetings from Electronic City ,India

Happy new year, thanks for sharing !

auf deutsch, da persönlich an Dich! Hallo Andreas, ich möchte mich herzlich bei Dir bedanken für dieses Jahr. Deine Videos sind mittlerweile für mich ein muss... der Sonntagmorgen hat eine neue Routine ;-) Auch deine Art und Weise ist immer sehr ansprechend, ich würde mir diesen Stil für einige andere Kanäle wünschen. Ich finde es fast unglaublich, wieviel Du produzierst! Kaum vorstellbar, wieviel Zeit Du hier investierst. Schade, dass ich es einfach (beruflich) nicht schaffe, mal bei Dir in der Nähe zu sein (das Bier steht ja noch aus!). Ich wünsche Dir und deiner Familie einen guten Rutsch in neue Jahr und ich freue mich schon darauf, was Du nächstes Jahr wieder hier (hoffentlich) machen wirst!

Just a note regarding the radar sensors: The radar sensors RCWL-0516, HB100 (10.525GHz), CDM324 (24GHz) are NOT interfered by the presence of an ESP8266 or ESP32. But they are interfered by a ripple on the supply chain. I did not manage to supply them by a switch mode regulator - even with additional low pass filterimng. For my the best and easiest way is to use a dedicated 7805 linear(!) regulator just for the radar sensors and the amplifiers you need for the CDM324 or HB100. After amplification you can feed the signal to an analog input of the ESP32 and perform a FFT to calculate the velocity. It works.

Can you make a video series of "how you learn"? Like how you tought yourself about BLE for example. With practical examples just as in any other video you make. Learning videos on learning :D

Thanks Andreas, your videos are great! I'm hoping you might evaluate the panasonic Grideye thermal sensor for human detection.. With some data processing you should be able to determine whether your entering a room, or leaving a room.. you also possibly determine your location in room, add gesture controls, and ignore non moving heat sources (like a soldering iron or other equipment... I think there's a lot of potential i haven't seen used with this sensor.. the programming for processing will be a bit of challenge (I have some experience mostly in the java / python department) I'm sure you can also count on some community support... Thanks again for your vids!

Thanks Andreas, love your videos. I just got myself an ESP32 and after a few hours of trying to get it setup (I stuffed up the Arduino IDE a few times) I got it working. The problem I'm facing is that when it first starts it finds the device fine and send the message to MQTT but after that it wont find it again; 09:53:05.698 -> WiFi connected, IP address: 192.168.1.105 09:53:05.698 -> Connect to MQTT server... 09:53:05.698 -> Attempting MQTT connection...connected Waiting for 60 seconds 09:54:06.922 -> BLE Scan restarted..... off 09:54:36.929 -> 09:54:36.929 -> BLE Scan restarted..... off 09:55:06.928 -> 09:55:06.928 -> BLE Scan restarted..... off Is this how its suppose to work or is there a way to get it to re-send the message to MQTT every time it scans it?

Awesome man. Greetings from Andreas on Off Grid Sweden

Very useful information. Thanks for sharing.

Bonjour Andreas comme toujours une analyse de très bon niveau, des informations pertinentes aussi bien pour les débutants que les plus chevronnés... quel plaisir de vous suivre ! Excellentes fête de fin d'année pour vous, les vôtres et... votre chaîne UKposts bien cordialement

once again you solved my problem. Happy new year sir.

Hello, Your UKposts channel is one of the best about electronics. Well done. I am waiting with interest for every next episode. Best regards, macnet.pl

Happy new year andreas. Thanks for all.

Happy new year. And hope for more awesome videos

Thank you so much bro! Great video !!

Einen guten Rutsch und Start ins neue Jahr 2018!

Great video, I do something similar with Estimote beacons, Pi3 and Homeseer home automation. Each of our three cars has a beacon on the dash and when the nodejs code on the Pi3 has not heard form a beacon for over 2 minutes it tells homeseer the car has left, and when it hears from the beacon again it tells homeseer the car has returned. Cheers tony

Thank you, Happy new year

Great video. I was planning to build a antiburglary human presence sensor operating behind glass (where PIR cannot be used) and planning to use dopler radar and ESP32. Disapointing to read they are not operating reliably when in close proximity to each other but at least I spared the effort. Any suggestion on what approach should I use ?

Thanks a lot ! I made an anti-theft key alarm using this .

Thanks for the details, I want to try this out with my home automation. Do you have any details on the distance that BLE works with the sensor? Do you have your ESP32 at the doorway of your workshop to detect within 1m of the doorway, or can you have it anywhere? Does the light trigger when you walk in the room directly above/below your workshop

First of all: Thank You for this (and your other) Video(s)! I, as a non-programmer and non-engineer, am just fiddeling with the script and I'm wondering: Could it be that I can't scan for a device (my "MI Band 2") while it's paired with my phone? (sorry for my not-the-best english)

I wish to you and your family Happy new year dear Andreas !:)

Hey Andreas, First of all happy new year! I think your video just inspired me to add some new members to my self built smart devices family. I‘m curious if you tried getting the heart rate from one of those armbands and if one can determine from that if the person who wears it is sleeping or not. This could be useful to turn stuff off after one falls asleep, ore in some cases disable the lights in the bedroom when the girlfriend is sleeping :p

Happy new year!!! I learned a lot about IoT and arduino in general, by far the best series of video tutorials about ESP. Regarding this video, did you found a way to get the RSSI from th BT devices?

Happy new year all :) Andreas, have you considered using a RPi and camera looking at the door? I wonder if a bit of machine learning could know when your come in and go out of the lab.

Happy new year Mr. Spiess, I wish you many happy years of hacking and many subscribers.

I love you man .. you made my day ... cheers :)

Hello there and thank you. I am looking to create social distancing alarm watches for children with audio/visual alerts based on the esp32 chipset. My question is whether or not the chipset has built in BLE to transmit proximity values in addition to what I already know it has the capability to do regarding reception of the signals. If it does, is there a significant latency period between switching modes between transmission and reception of signals, and if there is, can it be set to toggle between the two without absolutely draining a sub 1000 mAh battery in under 2 hours? Again, thank you so much. Great informative channel.

This this principle is used at my university to do check-in on in my lectures to record attendance

Nice video! I recently got a Google Home and have been thinking of trying something similar to your project using a Fitbit Charge 2 as the BLE wearable device and have the Google Home use Google's Nearby API to sense room occupancy and the have Google Home turn on a light, turn on the heat, etc. Still much to learn about Nearby API, Google Home, and if Fitbit and Google Home can interact.

Hi Andreas. As always, a very cool video. I have a question. I recently bought a small and cheap BLE iBeacon to play around with. The device is powered by a coin cell and features a push button. Is it possible to use such a device to trigger events on my Esp32? I would like to be able to use a small key-ring sized device to trigger a simple function on my Esp32. So I should like to know how to detect if the button on the iBeacon is pressed.

Happy new year Andreas. I wasn't able to watch the video when i came out as we were already doing new year's eve celebrations. I did like how you were able to use the sniffer to decode the packets. Thanks for the content for this year. I have a small small challenge for you (well it's for me) but you might have an idea. What if you want to detect someone within say a metre distant from a location, not not as close as RFID, and not as far as BLE? What technology would suggest investigating? I'm thinking some form of inductance based sensor for proximity, coupled with your BLE detector for individual. What do you think?

Hi, great video! What's the power consumption of the ESP32 while detecting present devices?

I like this idea a lot. I’m thinking though I could use an esp32 for Bluetooth and an esp8266 for WiFi. Connect them together with uart. Then I could have a continuous stream of Bluetooth RSSI measurements being transferred to the mqtt. No switching on and off the different radios. With a few different nodes measuring the same RSSI should be able to do some triangulation. What do you think about that?

happy new year from France

Happy New Year!

Hi Andreas, thanks for your great videos they are a source of inspiration. I need a hint for my project. I have 5 ESP32 connected in a mesh via BLE. I would like them to sense how physically distant they are from each other. It's for a game and I'm interested in approximately knowing their distance when they are between 10cm and 1 meter far apart. Is this feasible? (PIR, Ultrasound and laser won't work as they don't distinguish an esp. RFID and Hall sensor don't have proper range) thanks.

interesting, thank you for sharing

Dear Thanks for your videos! Could i ask for how can i do to adapt your code for detects advertising messages of BLE devices and compares it with stored MAC addresses and If ALL MAC matches, it sends an MQTT message. Thanks in advance

I haven't done this myself, but I understand that you can decode GSM headers using SDR/GNURadio. Presumably these headers contain some sort of device hardware address? It might be another route to investigate as it'd be pretty much rock solid for finding any devices regardless of wifi/BLE being turned on.

Thank, this gets me closre to a goal i have, id like to remind myself to not eat to much every time i enter the kitchen, but also id like to not spam me forever, do you have any idea on the range that the notification is sent?

Could you use the phone as a BLE tag? That's always in my pockets and has BLE always on. Thanks for the videos and happy new year!.

Hi Sir Andreas, thank you for making such amazing contents and help inspire people to build new things from what you had presented. Great videos man!! I'd like to ask a question, is it possible to "restart" (stop everything and re-initialize)the initialization of the BLE so that ESP32 can connect to multiple BLE by using the BLE Service and characteristics. I also would like to try transmitting my data using the advertisement layer which is through the BLE "name" but I cannot find how to change the name after the BLE Initialized. A little help would be greatly appreciated, thank you once again!!

Hi Andreas I think one of the Best human presence detectors is thermal D6T-44L-06 from Omron and I think you interested in multiple sensors for a human presence such as combination of PIR and radar in one box and I find that HB 100 has better response than $1 radar sensor

Hi Adreas, Great video. Till now you detect humans using PIR, radar sensors, wifi or BLE. All those methods are good or bad. Please consider a device to sniff the GSM signal, because a family member can have wifi on or off, BLE always off, but never GSM off I am looking forward for a video about this subject. Happy New Year

Nice video/project Andreas! Question... What libraries do I need to install besides Neil Kolban his Arduino Lib? I am getting this "fatal error: esp_gap_ble_api.h: No such file or directory" error... (also with Neil his lib examples). I guess it has something to do with Adafruit IDF, must this framework also be installed?

I needed a lazy way to take attendance in my class and remembered this project. I have it working now, but initially had a problem compiling: Sketch too big. I couldn't find the option to re-partition the storage, but eventually thought of changing the board from ESP32 DOIT to ESP32 Dev Module. Now the Partition Scheme option appears under Tools and I could change to Huge App, and all was well after that. I wonder did the libraries grow so much in 2 1/2 years? And why does the DOIT board not have the partition option? More lessons learned...

Hello Andreas and thanks for your video! Have you tested iBeacon with NRF51822 or NRF52810? Aliexpress has several options for tags on this chip. In theory, this should give a good result. This question is especially relevant now for HomeAssistant users who want to set up automations when they change location - "ibeacon" integration was added not so long ago. I found information about testing Chipolo One, but they did not achieve success there. For me personally, work through the EspHome Bluetooth Proxy is of particular interest

Hi, first thank you for all of your videos - they are very helpful. I am trying to load this sketch onto my ESP32 Firebeetle and i get an error message telling me that the SKETCH is too big. I have stripped out al of the comments and still I get the error message - can you suggest a way to resolve this. Thanks Peter.

Try Gigaset G-Tags as BLE Tokens. They are small, send constantly with an interval of about one second (if left unpaired) and the battery lasts about 36 months.

Great Video and a happy 2018. The code works, but if I try to use MQTT TLS/SSL with WiFiClientSecure.h the Code is just to big (102%) for a 4Mb Dev-board.

Hi Andreas What is the disadvantage of sending a SCAN_REQ too often? Do the beacons respond to it immediately with and therefore use more battery? Or do they only transmit after their broadcast delay time has been exceeded? Or what is / where does the SCAN_RSP come from? En Gruess!

Hi Andreas, Thank you so much for all your video´s. Really helping me out. I was wondering about your git code. On line 76 there is a value presented. The code writes -80. Is this where I can set the minimal signal strength for my BLE device? i.e. if I want my BLE device fairly close to the sensor I can change the value to lets say -50?

Thanks for the great video. Do you know why my smart watch is not detected by the esp32 when it's connected to the phone? As soon as I turn the BT of the phone off and the watch disconnects, it's detected by the esp32. Thanks!

Hi Andreas, Like to check with you, are you able to teach how to detect the ibeacon battery status level and send notification to mqtt server? This could be a very interesting topic.

Interesting! I also got some BLE itag (same from Aliexpress) - Make sure that are bluetooth 4.0! Distance (outdoors approx 15-20m) - indoors - within the same room. (or next room). For some reason the insist to switch off automatically. (keyring...).. Still trying to find out if i can configure them somehow

Happy New Year. Wondering if you have played with BLE 5.0 which support mesh.

I’ve noticed you used the new Wemos Lolin32 Pro, with the ESP32-WROVER, SD card & PSRAM: is that a bit of overkill, as simpler/cheaper versions could work, or is there a reason behind the choice? Also, do you plan to review it? Mine haven’t arrived yet, and there’s little info around about how to take advantage of its features…

hello Andreas, love your tutorial so much. Extremely interesting. I don't have esp32 but I had only HC08 and nodemcu esp8266, can i use your ino files code, can you advice what i need to change in using your ino files code given?

@Andreas Spiess May you recommend a sensor to detect a unique code/chip for a person?

This is a nice idea, but doesn't BLE have a substantial range? How do you prevent the ESP32 from detecting your device when you're not in the room but are nearby or even across the house? Is the ESP32's range limited to a few meters?

Andreas, do you have a Wemos D1 / PIR /IFTTT tutorial anywhere on the interwebs? awesome shop you've got there!

Hi Andreas, Excellent video using ESP32. I have followed ur instructions and successfully setup the BLE detection. I, however need to send data to my Home Automation setup (Domoticz) in a set format. I am unable to do in the #define PAYLOAD part of ur program. I can send MQQT data in this format to Domotiz only {"command": "switchlight", "idx": 2450, "switchcmd": "On" } Using this syntax instead of using "XXX" in the PAYLOAD section throws up compiler errors. Please help / guide. Many Thanks

Is it possible to use ble for precision tracking like air tags? Do you have a video on uwb?

Hi Andreas, what do you think of using MEMS Thermal Sensor like the Ormon D6T-44L ? They wouldn't require any external device I think.

Can you get the esp32 Bluetooth to detect and or link to a Tile Keyfob tracking device or the app that tracks it?

Andreas, can this be used to detect and act for just a single BLE device or can it be setup to detect one of a number of devices?. ie any one of several people

Hello Andreas, in the meantime, have you discovered how long the device will last when the device will advertise all the time? For example the Mi Band.

Happy newyear

Hi andreas , what sketch did you use to view the detected devices in serial window at 2:15 ?

Thanks for another useful video! Is the 52379 on the display @0:57 showing how many subscribers you have? Frohes neues Jahr und Alles Gute für 2018!

Happy New Year! PEACE...from electronicwizard