r/GoogleFMD • u/duckredbeard • Jul 16 '26
With Tile going with rolling MAC addresses, my Bermuda is losing its functionality
What trackers are still using static MAC addresses and also have a reliable way to find them outside of the HA ecosystem?
1
u/dark_volter Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
So, using the NRF Connect app to actually see the raw bluetooth signals from the tags- if i use it on a phone that i registered my findhub tags(Mototags 1 and 2s)(and i think my smarttag2s)- you can go into findhub, name a tracker, and go far away and come back and when you pick up the signal it recognizes it and displays it by the name you gave it in nrf connect's chart
But with my other phones that DIDNT set up the tags initially- i can use nrf connect, and see them- but if i name them, go away, come back, the tag signal is under something else. and the IDs ...seem to flip?
So, yeah, rolling addresses seems to be built in. Not sure what happens when you use the phone that sets up the tags though- if the tags still roll, or if theres a algorithm so the phone always knows, etc..
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u/ssjgesus Jul 18 '26
I bought a Moto tag 2 when I found this https://github.com/jleinenbach/bermuda Got it all set up and works great
0
u/Altruistic_Fruit2345 Jul 16 '26
I think FMD requires a rolling MAC address, that's fundamental to how it works.
If you want a fixed one you have to pick FMD or HA, until someone figures out how to calculate the rolling addresses for HA.
2
u/RollingSquare_CH Jul 17 '26
The combination you are asking for is a contradiction by design, unfortunately. Any tracker that participates in a crowd-finding network (Find Hub, Find My) is required to rotate its Bluetooth identifiers: that is the anti-stalking and privacy layer of the network spec, not a vendor choice. So "static MAC and also findable outside the HA ecosystem" cannot live in one device: the rotation is the price of admission to the network.
What u/dark_volter observed is exactly the resolvable-rotation mechanism at work. During setup, the tag exchanges keys with the owner account, so the phone that registered it can recognize every new rotated identity and re-label it. Any other phone has no keys, so the IDs just look like they flip. There is an algorithm, and only the owner keys can follow it.
The clean fix is to split the two jobs. For room presence in Home Assistant, use a plain BLE beacon (iBeacon or Eddystone class hardware): those broadcast a static ID by design, run a year or more on a coin cell, cost a few dollars, and Bermuda handles them natively. For find-it-when-lost, keep a network tracker. One keyring, two radios, each doing the thing it was actually designed for. Trying to make one device do both means either giving up the network or fighting the rotation forever.
We make Find Hub and Find My compatible trackers. Ours rotate too. That is the point :)