Category: iBeacon

Owntracks Location Tracking and Alerting

Owntracks is an open source app for iOS and Android that allows you to keep track of your (or vulnerable family member’s) location. However, it also has business uses to track valuable assets. You can also build a private location diary and share it with others.

It works with iBeacons to provide:

  • Locating indoors where GPS doesn’t work
  • Attributing location to a vehicle to track time spent commuting or to see where you have parked your car
  • Fitting to keys/luggage/expensive equipment to get notified when you leave them behind

iBeacons For Disaster Assistance

The Singapore Space and Technology Association has partnered with Airbus to launch a HADR (Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief) challenge. The objectives are to use latest technologies to aid rescue efforts.

Lee Wei Wen and Lee Wei Juin propose the use of iBeacon to display the GNSS locations of the rescuers with live updates of the rescue plan across different agencies:

What is iBeacon Technology?

We sometimes get asked “What is iBeacon Technology?”. In terms of the beacon itself, iBeacon doesn’t imply much. The underlying Bluetooth does most of the hard work. iBeacon is only one of many possible formats of standard Bluetooth advertising.

The iBeacon advertising consists of three identifiers UUID, major and minor. We have an article explaining how these are usually set up.

The more useful functionality is in iOS itself. Apps can declare an interest in particular beacons and be triggered even when the app is not running. The triggering is usually used to cause a notification on the phone that the user can tap on to do more. If the app is already open, it can look for beacons and display appropriate app content.

Android may also trigger and scan for iBeacons but this is in the context of scanning for Bluetooth advertising as opposed to specific iBeacons.

Learn More

What are Beacons?

Ways to Use Beacons

Buy iBeacons

iBeacons For Apple Passkit

A little known, under-promoted use of iBeacons is with Apple Passkit. Passkit allows you to create and distribute things like coupons, boarding passes, store cards, event tickets, promotions, offers or just information that can end up in the built-in iOS Wallet app. After adding a pass into the wallet, a user can get a notification about the pass when they are near an iBeacon associated with the pass, all without installing an app. There are lots of uses particularly in retail, events and hospitality.

The Apple developer documentation explains how the Wallet works and the passkit reference shows the iBeacon related set up fields.

An important thing to realise is that the beacon doesn’t send the pass to the smartphones. They just cause the triggering. You need to provide a mechanism, usually via a web site, where users can download the pass from your web server. Your server must be secure (HTTPS) and use a SSL certificate from a known certificate authority. Self-signed certificates won’t work. You will also have to set your server to serve the application/vnd.apple.pkpass MIME type when hosting the pass file.

There’s a useful example by Tom Harrington who shows how he created a Passbook Business Card. If you are not a technical person and it all looks too complicated, PassKit Inc  (nothing to do with Apple) have a platform based on Apple Wallet.

Apple Passkit works with all iBeacons.

Make Your Mac Advertise iBeacon

Want to experiment with beacons without buying one? There’s a new command line tool mBeacon that allows you to set up your Mac to advertise iBeacon.

You use by typing the following command:

$ mbeacon -uuid "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX" -major 0 -minor 0

The ability to easily change the UUID, major and minor is also useful for development purposes where you wish to test, for example, an app that’s looking for lots of different beacons.

Open Source iBeacon CMS

There’s often the requirement to show data triggered by beacons detected by iOS and Android apps. There are many SaaS subscription systems to do this for you but what if you want to host the data yourself or have a large number of beacons where SaaS solutions aren’t economically viable?

You could create your own CMS. However, take a look at SBCMS. SMCMS provides a simple open source CMS that can be hosted on your own server or automatically on a Heroku cloud server instance.

Learn more:

Trigger Data and Beacon Servers

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