BC011

These Blue Charm beacons do exactly what they say they do. They were easy to set up, easy to program, and simple to attach to keys or place where needed. The app gives you access to useful settings like the beacon name, measured power, power profile, firmware updates, and different broadcast options depending on what your compatible device or system supports. Once configured, other compatible devices can detect them reliably, and they quietly do their job in the background. Overall, they’re a solid little product: easy to configure, easy to carry, and useful for a variety of Bluetooth beacon needs. I’d definitely recommend them.

I use these with ESPresense and Home Assistant in my home and business. In my business it turns lets the building know when one of my employees is there. Then Homeassistant turns on the lights and adjusts the thermostat. When everyone shows as gone homeassistant turns off any remaining lights and outlets ensuring no coffee pots, etc are left on over night. That functionality would not be possible without these little devices on my key employee's key chains.

Using these with room assistant to track everything from water bottles to my AirPods. They take a few seconds to update but their ease of setup and configuration options, ability to lock down and replaceable battery means I’ll be using these for quiet some time.

I bought this beacon after consulting with the BlueCharm Beacon support folks (they responded within a couple of hours of my request) because I wanted to experiment with scanning for beacons from an iOS app using CoreBluetooth as opposed to the Beacon APIs in CoreLocation. Since iBeacons aren't normally detectable using CoreBluetooth, I needed a beacon that could advertise in other formats, such as Eddystone. I was able to successfully scan for Eddystone UID and TLM payloads (I'll provide BlueCharm with the details so you can likely ask them directly about this if you are interested). The suggested KBeacon iOS app worked flawlessly for configuring the beacon. I was able to use it to change the UID/TLM payloads and then see those custom values in the advertising data when scanning with CoreBluetooth! Throughout this, BlueCharm support was very helpful and responsive to all of my questions. Thanks again!

Works well for presence tracking. Default out-of-box configuration is good for basic use. The KBeacon configuration app has tons of useful settings including forcing "always on" and advertising TLV broadcasts for monitoring battery life / uptime. This device is essentially a rebadged lower cost device from China, but I support paying a bit extra for the convenience of Amazon and the small company that resells this.

So far, so good. Working well with Home Assistant and tracking if the dogs are in the home/yard. Exactly what I needed.

Can't work it

Configuration of this beacon is done via a generic android app. I reduced the beacon interval down to 4 seconds. Battery life is greater than a year. It's low profile, and I taped it to a paper card and put it in my wallet. In a pinch if I lose my wallet, I can use the app and scan for it and narrow down the room I lost my wallet in. No, it's not quite like a tile, but it works with open source projects like home assistant.

Excellent product, install KBeacon app and you have the option to change the configure, much more options to configure than tile.