I really haven't read into much about iBeacons beyond the fact that they are low energy bluetooth transmitters that are able to detect nearby proximity devices. I am aware that there are beacon devices such as estimote that allows users to get prompts when entering their proximity. However, I am wondering if two iPhones can act as both beacons and receivers at the same time. So is possible for User A to be able to connect to User B when he arrives in a particular distance of the person?
By connect what I mean is for some sort of interaction to occur.
(e.g. Notifying User A that User B is nearby or exchanging messages that these users would like to send to people that comes in their proximity)
Thanks guys.
Yes, iPhones can both act as iBeacons and receive iBeacon signals. But they can only act as an iBeacon when the transmitting app is in the foreground.
What you suggest is all possible, but it is important to note that the iBeacon concept is connectionless. It is a one way transmission of a simple identifier from beacon to receiver. If you want to make a connection and exchange data, you need a separate mechanism like the internet or a non-iBeacon Bluetooth connection.
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I have played around with Airlocate and two iPhones. Also between a Linux /hcitool beacon transmitter and Airlocate ranging. I see that the set of proximity UUIDs to be tracked are hardcoded in the Airlocate source code.
Is it possible for an iOS app to get a more generic call back , when it is in the vicinity of any iBeacon (any proximity UUID) and let that app decide how to go about behaving the way it wants.
I understand that this should definitely be possible from the OS perspective, as I see a 9 byte iBeacon prefix in the start of the PDU, which is independent of the proximity UUID.
Another query - I view hardcoding the proximity UUID in the APP as some sort of pairing . How is general bluetooth pairing different from this.
My aim in asking these questions is to understand the feasibility of using beacons to beam (broadcast) data, so that all recipients in the vicinity can receive it. If I choose to go with a specific 16 byte proximity UUID, then I am left with only 5 bytes (Major/minor/power) to beam data. Otherwise I get 21 bytes
By "more generic call back", it seems like you are trying to listen to iBeacons that are not deployed by you. The answer to this is NO, you can't do that.
According to this post:http://beekn.net/2013/10/ibeacons-can-my-ios-app-find-beacons-that-arent-mine/ , in order to listen to an iBeacon, you must know its proximityUUID first.
Unfortunately Apple decides to limited your ability to do that. CoreBluetooth framework can detect iBeacon nearby but since it only returns the device UUID, not the proximityUUID, you cannot add callback to them.
And Android can read the proximityUUID of any iBeacon without any problem.
If I use beacon in a store,the device can push some advertisement to customer`s phone.
How can I push the advertisement to the beacon device?
I beacons are not two way communication devices, they are low powered bluetooth devices that advertise some specific info. So it's only one way. There are only two modes of operations for a beacon , as region-monitoring and ranging.
Here's guide on how these beacons work...
http://www.warski.org/blog/2014/01/how-ibeacons-work/
You can't send message to other via beacon device. Do you have beacon device in store? If Yes, your app must installed in user device which is also in foreground while they entered into your store. So while your beacon device broadcasting, your app can detect accurately where they are. and your app must do some calculation based on location(use triangle theory). Send this information to your server, they will send information to your customer. For example, if your customer now in center of your store, you can popup ads with product image(Flat 50% offer...)
See this apple's doc to learn more about beacon.
I want to build and app which can detect other iPhones with my app within 65 feet range. As I understand I have the following choices:
Use Bluetooth to check periodically whether there is device with my app in the range. Send list of found devices to the server. The problem here is battery consumption. Is it true that Bluetooth will be disabled after some period of time automatically?
Can I use BLE technology for this purpose? If so, do you know what devices support BLE?
What is the best option on your opinion? Did I miss some other option?
Thanks
UPDATE
I plan to run search every 20 seconds or even more often.
There is no simple answer to this problem.
Bluetooth has 2 flavors: "Regular" bluetooth, used for hands-free devices, headphones, and the like, and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy)
Regular bluetooth devices must be paired. (I'm less familiar with regular bluetooth than BLE, so take my explanation of this bit with a grain of salt.) In order to be paired they have to be put into "discoverable" mode, which broadcasts their ID. That is a battery-draining and only done briefly. It's not an "always on" solution.
BLE has a range of up to 60 meters, so it should meet your need in that regard.
BLE devices can "advertise" as a "peripheral" for extended periods. Other Bluetooth devices can act as a "central" and ask to be notified when certain peripheral devices are detected. I'm not sure if you can make an iOS device advertise (broadcast) as a BLE peripheral while it's in the background and/or if the device is locked, but it will certainly advertise while it's running. I'm pretty sure you can register to be notified when you detect a certain BLE peripheral from the background, but not positive.
iBeacons are a specific use of BLE with some extra limitations and some extra abilities. An iBeacon is a dirt-simple transmitter that sends a UUID plus a major and minor value and a signal strength calibration value periodically (usually once a second.) You can't add any other data to an iBeacon transmission. iOS can only act as an iBeacon transmitter when the app is in the foreground. If your app moves to the background, it stops transmitting. Period.
However, you can listen for iBeacon signals even from the background. AND, if you've registered as a listener for an iBeacon and the system terminates your app due to low memory, the system still listens for those beacons on your behalf. If iOS detects a beacon you're listening for, you get re-launched if needed, and notified in the background. You can then post a local notification to get the user's attention.
iBeacons are probably your best bet, but you will need your users to be actively running your app in the foreground in order to transmit a signal. That will drain your user's battery fairly quickly.
One possible solution would to have have every single device send their locations to your server every predetermined time period (more frequent the better but more resource intensive). Then, query the data from the server and get the location of all the devices near you.
Keep in mind, that this probably won't be very useful for real-time data collection. For example, if you want to send data every 30 seconds or so, this isn't a good option.
Use this option if you want to get data every 15-20 minutes or so.
When you start advertising a CLBeacon with peripheral data, can you pass in a NSString or UIImage into this dictionary that you could then have show up when the beacon is discovered?
For example, if I wanted to create write a message to a friend and then when the friend entered the beacon area, could I have the message show up on their phone by storing the message in the NSDictionary and then extracting it? If so, how? If not, is there another way?
Thanks!
So you are asking if you could add extra information to the beacon advertisement that's sent by a beacon device that a custom application could look for?
The answer is no. The iBeacon protocol is a very short, fixed packet of data. There's no facility for adding extra information to the packets.
You could design and implement your own BLE service that's an alternative to iBeacons and implement it on both the transmitter and the receiver.
You could also use a hybrid approach, where you use standard iBeacon discovery to find beacons, and when you detect a beacon you're interested in, trigger a 2-way BLE conversation with the beacon and ask it for additional information. It's my understanding that some of the BLE devices that are being sold as iBeacons can run custom software that would implement this sort of thing. (Many of these devices have ARM processors in them, the same family of chips that power iOS devices.
No, you cannot do this. iOS-based iBeacons (like all other standard iBeacons) will only transmit a three-part identifier and a transmitter power calibration value. That's it. You cannot transmit anything else.
Even if you did make a custom Bluetooth LE advertisement that sends additional data besides the standard iBeacon fields, you wouldn't be able to see this data with the standard APIs for seeing iBeacons.
If you want to tie other data to an iBeacon, you have to do it through another channel, by some kind of lookup that matches the data up with the identifiers above. Three common ways to do this:
Hard-code a static lookup table in your app.
Use a Web Service to look up the value based on the iBeacon identifiers.
Fetch the data directly from a (non-standard) iBeacon using a secondary BluetoothLE communication channel.
My company has a web service called ProximityKit that makes it easy to tie data to iBeacons in your app. You log into a web interface to type in key/value pairs to associate with each iBeacon, then the included iOS client library automatically gives you those key/value pairs when the iBeacon is visible.
how is it possible to send data to an iPhone which acts as an iBeacon?
I am looking for an process as the following:
Search nearby iBeacons
Connect to some iBeacon
Exchange data between the devices
Does anybody know how to put the different bluetooth functions together to make
this possible?
thx in advance
Standard iBeacons are transmit-only devices that can be seen by mobile devices, but don't actually "connect" to them or exchange data.
But you can still do what you are asking if you have an app on all devices as well as a web service to do the data transfer. This would allow devices A and B to detect each other when they are nearby and exchange data. Here's how:
Your app on devices A and B alternates between acting as an iBeacon (advertising its presence with an application-specific identifier and a phone-specific identifier) and ranging for iBeacon signals including the application-specific identifier.
During its ranging cycle, your app on device A will detect an iBeacon transmission from device B, which includes both your application identifier and the device identifier of B.
App A then makes a "write" call to the web service with a source of "A" and a destination of "B", along with any data you want to transfer, like "Device A says hello to device B."
The app would also periodically make a "read" call to the web service. In this example, device B would read any information destined for B, and the web service would return a record that device A had send it a message with the data "Device A says hello to device B."
Because the same process is also running on both phones, this communication can happen both ways.
iBeacon is a proximity technology and isn't designed for data interchange. However, since the Bluetooth stack is going to be active on your iPhone acting as the beacon (so it can advertise its proximity UUID), you can use Core Bluetooth to connect to the beacon and exchange data between the devices.
Does it specifically need to use iBeacon technology? The reason I ask is that from reading your description of the process, you could achieve the same thing using iOS 7's Multipeer Connectivity. It's able to abstract out all the technical complexities of connecting 2 iOS devices together regardless of the interface, be it WiFi or Bluetooth. I've managed to build something similar using MCNearbyServiceBrowser, MCNearbyServiceAdvertiser, and MCSession classes.