Bluetooth Find Devices - bluetooth

I building a application that contains bluetooth functionality. Everything works find and to test it.
The question is, is there any way I can simulate a devices bluetooth so that my application can discover it. I need to test it for around 30 devices bluetooth, seems like unreasonable for me to go find 30 real devices.
If someone could point me to an existance app or article to refer would be helpful.

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ESP32 Bluetooth Pairing To Phone

I am trying to make it so that my ESP32 board can detect my phone when I approach it based on RSSI. However, the ESP32 cannot see the phone unless the phone is in discovery mode, which is not super useful. To solve this, I was hoping to pair my phone with the ESP32 so that the phone would always be looking for the ESP32, and connect when it is found without any human intervention.
I decided to try the Arduino integration, but as I was working through all of the examples I couldn't find any with this functionality, so I'm kind of lost. If this is not possible or easy with Arduino, I am willing to switch, but I was unable to find anything about pairing in the normal phone interface for ESP-IDF either.
So, basically, using an ESP32, how do I pair to a phone?
The easiest way is to make the esp a gatt server and advertise a specific service. The phone will look for that specific service and connects if found.
You could make an app for your phone, like for ios its pretty easy. But keep in mind for mobile devices a continuous search for devices could be power unfriendly if misused.
If you use esp-idf instead of arduino, some examples are included. (You could use the vscode integrated esp-idd) Check learnesp32.com for an easy step into the basics, coming from Arduino.

Is there way to detect a certain phone from a few feet away

I am trying to build a system with a raspberry pi that allows clients access into a building depending on their membership status. Right now, it uses QR codes, but I want to know if it is possible to add a feature where it uses some technology like NFC or RFID or Bluetooth to detect their phone or RFID card from at least a foot away and confirm they have a membership.
Someone told me I could use RFID, but I am only aware of that being used in short-distance applications, like a card on a hotel door. I am not sure about Bluetooth either, because the phone would have to connect to the pi first, right? Maybe there is something I don't know about. So please offer any suggestions. Thanks
I think bluetooth does good work for tracking user. Since it's the best to handle large distances than NFC and RFID these two technologies are used for low range scenarios, check this link.
In addition, you can check distance(using Proximity and RSSI) and membership status as well. but you need to know how to handle bluetooth connectivity with raspberry pi check this link. as well create an app on that mobile phone to use Bluetooth (depending which OS you're using for Android, iOS).
Regards,

Device for testing BLE that works with Windows

I'm looking for a recommendation for a device for testing BLE devices with Windows. The Windows API itself seems really flaky, and doesn't give much debug information, so I'm thinking a standalone device, probably that plugs in over USB and skips the Windows BLE stack altogether is the way to go. What I'm looking for would:
Be able to connect to a GattServer and do all the typical operations ( read, notify, etc )
Nice to haves:
Give debug information about the connection state
Trace packets
Have some kind of automation hook, that is, COM, CLI, etc so that the data read from a characteristic could be dumped into Python etc
Anyone have any products they would recommend?

Feasibility of BlueTooth Reader and App Project

I'm working on a project to track delivery trucks leaving and returning to the office.
While I know RFID would work, we're also looking at BlueTooth with mobile apps. Ideally, once a driver installs the app, we register a unique ID for the device, and a BT reader identifies when phones/deliveries leave and enter range without any user interaction.
From the Android 6.0 release notes, it looks like the MAC address is hidden from apps and BT broadcasting. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/marshmallow/android-6.0-changes#behavior-hardware-id
User management of app installs and enabling BT aside, is this feasible?
Can someone point me in the right direction to confirm what identifiers are available?
When I understand you correctly you actually do not want to track where a phone is but want to know if a person/truck/phone passes a kind of checkpoint or gate?
For newer smart phones you cannot rely on the visible MAC. Bluetooth classic is usually not visible and the BLE MAC is randomized as long as the device is not paired and bonded.
Indeed as PaulW11 stated, the simple way would be to implement an app which does BLE advertising with short advertising interval. Inside this advertisment you can put some custom data. This will be visible to everyone. This ID can be some random number, a number assigned by you or whatever.
At the gate you would implement a BLE scanner grabbing all advertisments near to it.
This should be easy to implement.
I would also like to mention the drawbacks here: If someone passes the gate you may miss him. BLE with Android is always tricky and you might have the situation that the bluetooth subsystem on a phone may have stopped working or so.
One the other hand if someone comes accidently near to your gate, you will think he left or returned. Near can be something around 50 m or so with good conditions or only 10 in other cases.
And even worse: If someone stays 'nearly' in the range of the gate you will see im sporadically. This may confuse your come and go logic if he is visible every 3 minutes or so...

Bluetooth SPP device on Windows 8

I've been banging my head against the proverbial wall trying to working out how to talk to a Bluetooth device that uses the Serial Port Profile (SPP) in a Windows 8 Metro-Style App. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it's not currently possible, but was wondering if anyone else has been able to get this to work, or can think of anything to try.
There doesn't seem to be an API available to do this, but would it be possible to connect to a device at a lower level?
According to a Microsoft rep, this is not possible in Metro:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tailoringappsfordevices/thread/0cb2a6c1-d1f1-4872-aa32-709acd90b94d
It should be possible to write a custom driver to accomplish this, but that is significantly more of a challenge than writing a Metro app.

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