BeaconThings is a simple app to let you integrate iBeacons into your SmartThings smart home. With BeaconThings, you can get more reliable, and more specific location information. Spread some beacons around your home, register them with BeaconThings, and it will tell SmartThings when youre nearby. For each BeaconThing your register, a device is added to SmartThings that can be used with SmartRules, or custom SmartApps, to trigger events.
BeaconThings are organized into "Places" and "Areas". An area is one specific location, like "Kitchen", and is specified by one specific beacon. Areas map to the "minor" field of the beacon. A place is something like "Home", or "Work", and would typically contain multiple areas. This maps to the "major" field of the iBeacon. When setting up your home, youll configure your beacons with the BeaconThings UUID (specified in the app), and then choose a unique major value for each place, and unique minor values for each area. When any of the areas in one place are detected, then that place is "present".
Once youve registered your BeaconThings, you never need to open this app again. It will do its work 100% in the background with no user interaction required.
To minimize battery drain, BeaconThings only uses iBeacon monitoring. This means that it wont tell you whether you are inches from the beacon, or 20 feet away, only whether or not the beacon is detected in range. When you need to detect a limited range, just use an iBeacon with configurable power settings.
BeaconThings is currently only designed to be run on one device. Using BeaconThings on multiple devices with the same beacons will result in unexpected behavior. This is a feature that will be added at some point, but it is not supported yet.
NOTICE: iBeacons just broadcast a few values and can easily be replicated. obycode does not advise using iBeacons to trigger security sensitive actions (such as unlocking a door).