Comments on: Follow-Me Phoning: Implementing Bluetooth Proximity Detection with Asterisk, Part II

By: newdawn

newdawn — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:52:07 +0000

Could anybody help me??? I did everything as its written here, but the system cant find my bluetooth device with hcitool dev. I get a null string. And its a dlink dbt 120. Im working with vmware, and trixbox. Please somebody help me!!! [WM: Bluetooth didn't work with the VMware build of trixbox 1.2.3. Download PBX in a Flash and use it. Bluetooth works out of the box.]

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:47:21 +0000

Hi, great article…I’m a bit of a linux novice. I can’t actually get my system to pick up the bluetooth dongle in the first place? Any idea’s on why this might be happening and how to resolve it? I’m running CentOS 4.2.

By: David

David — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:53:22 +0000

One thing that I’ve found is that if the headset and phone are connected then

hcitool name MAC

returns null. If they are not connected (and turned on) then I get the name as expected.

By: Clint

Clint — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:26:42 +0000

I’m using Asterisk@Home 2.2. When I try to rpm -Uvh the download (BTW, above link didn’t work) It says it’s not an RPM package. Not sure what the cause is yet, if I figure it out I will post it.

[WM: WebMin works for me. You might want to try downloading 260 now that it’s available.]

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:33:12 +0000

update:

Ok, I found the cheapest (oh and I do mean cheap – nasty nasty cheap) bluetooth headset that I could – it cost about 4.99 (I’m sure the shop would have paid me to take it to be honest)- it’s totally useless as a BT headset, but as a BT tag it’s wonderful. I’ve just added it to my chan_btp/btpd config and it works perfectly. I think I’ll need to ge the Dremel out to make it better looking though.

asterisk*CLI> show btp
Bluetooth Presense Clients:
andyhs/20:03:03:17:19:2C — SIP/2207 (score=246)
Bluetooth Presense Locators
test — SIP/2207

Headset info:

Manuf: Rayzor
Model: BT-HS-01
WWW : http://www.rayzor.nl

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 01:43:41 +0000

Although installing and configuring asterisk isn’t as easy as it could be, it’s not rocket science. Aside from that, btp doesn’t invlove a full cvs checkout. IIRC, asterisk@home does actually use a source install and builds it at install time. This means only btp needs checking out and building which is trivial.

One of the problems with using headsets is the distance from the bt device tends to be pretty short (<10m) – The advantage of using a phone is that this can be much futher (<100m) – although those distances are maximums… Personally I use a SE P910i which doesn’t suffer from any of the side effects you mention (loss of bt on sleep) and gives good range. This essentially means I get coverage throughout the house (European houses tend to have brick internal walls). BTP also allows any linux box with a BT dongle to act as a reporter – reporting presence back to an asterisk server.

You are correct that BTP doesn’t allow the method you employ, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to rectify 🙂

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:18:02 +0000

Why are you making things so difficult for yourself? Check out btp from digium cvs it's a much neater and more integrated solution. [WM: We didn't really think much of our approach was difficult. In fact, it's pretty simplistic. But, each to his or her own, I suppose. I'm not sure many would share your view that compiling and configuring a CVS release of Asterisk is exactly a walk in the park. While I haven't checked lately, my recollection is that the Bluetooth Presence Daemon (asterisk-btp) lacked the necessary support for detecting Bluetooth headsets. And I hope our article made clear that this is the only practical way to implement Bluetooth Proximity Detection. Most Bluetooth cellphones usually have Bluetooth disabled when they are in "sleep" mode which makes them virtually useless for accurate proximity detection.]

By: Jenn

Jenn — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 23:20:04 +0000

Fantastic articles so far. I’m anxiously awaiting the 3rd.

Question: in the headset instructions, it isn’t clear why you changed the last digit of the MAC to another hex number. Can you explain?

Write down the MAC address of your headset including the colons between the hex code digits. This is the notation we?��?�?Ǭ�?��Ǩ?�?ɂİ?Ǭ�?��Ǩ?�?ɂ��?Ǭ�ll be using to actually check whether your headset is within range. Here?��?�?Ǭ�?��Ǩ?�?ɂİ?Ǭ�?��Ǩ?�?ɂ��?Ǭ�s the command so try it out substituting the MAC address of your headset for mine below:

hcitool name 00:03:89:43:84:e2

Now run the command again and change the last digit of the MAC address to another hex number:

hcitool name 00:03:89:43:84:e6

[WM: It was simply to demonstrate that you get the name of the device returned when you enter an existing MAC address, and you get a null string when you enter a non-existent MAC address. All will be made clear … in Chapter 3.]