Sometimes I have the most weird and insane ideas.
I am a building manager of a huge building. Now when I’m somewhere in the building, nobody can find me.
Me and my colleagues all have the same problem.
I am a hobbyist and want to make this easy for everybody.
So now I got this crazy idea to install a bluetooth receiver in every room which is connected to a server.
Everything will be connected with Blynk.
Behind the window of the office, there will be a screen which displays the building managers. (Most likely a android tablet)
Once I add someones phone bluetooth mac address with his name to the system, it’ll appear on the screen.
When I enter the room, my phone connects with the bluetooth receiver and the system will show where I am.
When I’m connected to more than one receiver, it will choose the one with the strongest signal.
I don’t know I will actually make this project, but I’m always willing to share ideas, for someone that may want to use this idea for himself.
I really don’t know if Blynk is the right choice to use, but I really like working with Blynk, and don’t have the experience to make my own server from scratch.
This kind of stuff already gets provided by big companies like HPe, Cisco, Aruba, Meru and many many more. But they are highly expensive. The most important part are the BLE tags in each room. They usually are battery powered, so you have replace them or the batteries every x-years. That is also the most expensive part I think.
But it would be nice to see a low-budget open source alternative
This would be all fixed if using the esp32.
You also can use an esp8266 with a serial bluetooth module, I think…
With a Raspberry Pi as server, the esp8266 with bluetooth module (esp32) in every room and your phone as bluetooth tag.
You can also automatically turn lights with this setting by only adding a relay.
no direct answer without to know the already available facilities below are some data will be required to get the
best answer (from me or somebody else)
home many Rooms in your huge building (is it a Hotel?)
is every Room has WIFI or Ethernet connection
if WIFi and or Ethernet available is it centralized or every own has his own connection.
is the building covered completely by centralized WIFI or no ?
what is the Min and Max budget of your project ?
home many person will use that solution (you and your college) ?
that will make the the image more clear to you and anybody need to help
The whole building has wifi connection.
I don’t know what my budget is. This is only an idea. Don’t know if it will be an actual project which i will make.
some more questions , it’s good that entire building is covered by WIFI BUT
based on your answer i will assume that it’s impossible to cover a huge building with only one access point.
what is the AP setup is is for example 1 AP every floor or Multiple AP per floor ?
is All the access points create a Mesh networks (share the same SSID and Password) ?
assume you have 5 floors building every floor has 2 access points so you have 10 Access points here.
every Access point has it’s Own IP address.
Now you have mapped IP and Location based table now as per that you can determine where is the user (approximately).
mainly now i can see that you will have a device with every employee ( you and your colleagues) which is a ESP8266 rechargeable battery powered in a small form factor in a nice slim box fit in pocket.
that device will connect and disconnected from WIFI every one minute and once the Hardware connected to the WIFI with the Highest rssi signal , and will report that to a blynk .
you portable ESP8266 device will report back the rssi and the IP address to a virtual Pin in Blynk Dash board
and based on that IP you will know that employee XXX is very near to The Access point with have the IP 192.168.1.XXX in second floor the right side.
of course you will predefined the IP tables and location in The ESP8266 FW so deviec will report the location and rssi to blynk.
My idea was more with bluetooth. So I don’t have to carry more things with me. So I add my phone bluetooth address to the system which will recognize my phone when I am in the room.
So every room has a bluetooth receiver and is connected to the main wifi network. Which is in the whole building the same. So on the fifth floor i will see all the devices on the first floor.
Every floor is installed with I think 20 AP’s and the building has 4 floors. I don’t know the whole schematics but, it’s a big network.
So no esp in my pocket but in every room and a phone which connects and disconnects with the esp’s.
But maybe it’s cheaper to do what you said. To use only one esp which connects to the AP and gets the IP address to get the location.
Using Wifi for tracking requires very specific setup of the accesspoints, we’ve been looking at that, but it’s basically a pain in the butt. BLE would be more apropriate.
I think its implementable, the main component (per room) are ESP8266 arround $2.5 and HC05 bluetooth module its also arround $2.5, oh by the way The ESP is running in 3.3v and HC05 is 5v so there shoud be some voltage levelling between this two circuits, and also additonal bucks for the power supply.
