Bluetooth Presence Alerter

A bash based script to ping a list of devices and alert of the presence changes

Getting Started

Prerequisites

The following packages should be installed already, but if they aren’t, then run the following:

sudo apt-get install vim
sudo apt-get install l2ping

Tmux will also be used to run the script in a session that won’t be closed when disconnecting.

sudo apt-get install tmux

Global variables

You will need to set the following global variable

BLUETOOTH_PRESENCE_ALERTER_ROOT

To set this, run the following command:

sudo vim /etc/environment

and add the following

export BLUETOOTH_PRESENCE_ALERTER_ROOT={THE FULL DIRECTORY WHERE YOUR "ping_bluetooth_address.sh" IS LOCATED}

Configuration

The following configuration files are required:

device_list.lst
telegram_bot_properties.props

The contents for device_list.lst should contain the following. Multiple configurations are supported:

DeviceOwner=mac_address
DeviceOwner_2=mac_address_2

The contents for telegram_bot_properties.props should contain the following.

If multiple entries are made, the alert will be sent to each config.

BOT_API_KEY|CHAT_ID
BOT_API_KEY_2|CHAT_ID_2

You may also want to set the bluetooth timeout interval on linux. This will stop the script from running for excessive amounts of time.
Do this as follows:

sudo hciconfig hci0 pageto 8000

Bot Details

Your api key for your bot can be retrieved from bot_father on telegram.

To find your chat_id, do the following (Note: The following should be done without a responsive bot framework hosting your bot).

1. Create a group with your bot, or a private chat if you are not intending on using the bot in a group.
2. Send a inline message to the bot (A message starting with “/“)
3. Run the following command:

   curl -i -X GET https://api.telegram.org/bot{BOT_API_KEY}/getUpdates

   You will get a response similar to the following. The chat_id is included in the “chat” section:

   {
   "ok": true,
   "result": {
    "message_id": xxx,
    "from": {
      "id": xxx,
      "is_bot": true,
      "first_name": "xxx",
      "username": "xxx"
    },
    "chat": {
      "id": 12345, //This line contains the CHAT_ID
      "title": "xxx",
      "type": "xx",
      "all_members_are_administrators": true
    },
    "date": xx,
    "text": "xx"
   }
   }

4. Use this value in the config file to send messages to this particular group/private chat.

Scheduling

You can start a new tmux session as follows:

tmux new -s1

Then run your script:

${BLUETOOTH_PRESENCE_ALERTER_ROOT}/ping_bluetooth_address.sh

You can then detach from your session by pressing the following:

"CTRL+b" and then "d"

To re-attach to you sessionso that you can see your script run etc, run the following

tmux attach-session -t1

Remember to detach from your session, and then you can safely close your session.