Raspberry Pi and bluetooth/wifi "nearby phone detection"

Here’s the problem you will have. Most modern cell phones will spoof their MAC addresses for both WiFi and Bluetooth. Periodically (once every 15 minutes or so) it will just up and change to use a different MAC address. This is a good thing as it means you are much harder to individually track as you move about the world. But it means your plans to scan for BT MAC addresses of your phone won’t work.

You can tell that an iPhone is present. You can’t tell that your iPhone is present.

You can turn off the MAC address randomization for the WiFi but you can’t for BT.

If despite this limitation you still want to do this see:

There are many other approaches I’m sure.

If you have an Android I’d recommend using FIND (https://www.internalpositioning.com/) the server for which can be installed from openhabian-config. This uses the wifi signal strengths from your and you neighbor’s wifi APs to triangulate the phone’s position inside a building.

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