@Jeffrey_Dungen I appreciate the feedback! I updated my above post to reflect the fact that I got a lot of your demo working with various Android apps. (Once I got your newer version installed, I’m not sure if my issue with “getting my phone & transmitter apps not showing up” was that it was getting late, or that I still had my phone configured -but NOT paired- with openhab as a thing. I removed it and tested again today and got it to show up.) I wanted people to know that if they have ideas or direction with openhab-integration, they will at least get this far!
While I’m thinking a stand-alone $19 ibeacon will resolve my desire to try and get bluetooth presence working with a cell phone (and I wanted this to work with a phone for obvious reasons such as you won’t need to ducttape a beacon on your chest, but we DO voluntarily do that with our cell phones 
)… much time is freed up these days due to the virus. Sigh. So I may tinker with it more. I never heard of node until recently, so there’s much of a learning curve. Sigh again!
Questions:
- Could my issue from Rich’s OP (error posted above) & my @abandonware “fix” be resolved by replacing Rich’s “app.bind( { protocol: ‘hci’, path: ‘null’ } );” with something along the lines of “app.addListener…”? (It seems app.bind function doesn’t exist in the older reelyActive version. I saw you call that in your /pi-suite/bin/pi-suite-hci script.) Is there much extra needed to get it working from there? (And is there a URL in github or whatever that would help a little with dev or documentation of classes/methods, etc?) I totally understand if this question is out-of-bounds, but I was still curious about the mqtt integration with pi-suite. (Or do you already have a pi-suite/mqtt tutorial? )
- During my testing with your pi-suite demo, I could only get ibeacon & eddystone transmitters via Android phone apps, and Chromecast to show up in the hello-tracking demo web-app. I could not get my phone to show up when I put it in pair/discover mode, or any other time, without these transmitter apps. Is this expected? Does reelyActive only support “transmitting beacons”, which my phone is NOT without an app? If so, would it be much to add this functionality so that pi-suite could “see” my phone in discover mode? I also noticed when I go to discover mode on my phone, my wife’s phone shows up sometimes - so it appears there is so kind of traffic being generated - could pi-suite pick up this traffic? (I know many presence detection use-cases required very frequent updates, but I don’t, so this could be useful enough. And if one needed more updated frequencies they could look into an android app, UUID detection, or getting a beacon.) (Sidenote: Via the updated openhab Bluetooth Binding here I was able to get my phone to show up in openhab and report its rssi value, and had it get higher/lower depending on how far my phone was from the pi - so it appears the hardware will support it.)
- Does or could the pi-suite recognize the UUID of the bluetooth device service? This could then overcome the random mac that phones unfortunately use for security reasons. If so, I could see a phone transmitting a signal via either, the already-existing discover/pair/connect mode I mentioned above (same signal that allows my phone to automagically connect to my truck’s bluetooth when I drive it, though I don’t know if that is a service with a UUID) -OR- have an Android app send a unique service UUID (many apps exist already) to identify that phone/user. (Then this gets passed to mqtt and so on.)
Thanks again!