Beacons don’t just work with smartphones. They can work with any other devices that have Bluetoooth LE. This includes Single Board Computers (SBCs) such as the Raspberry Pi 3 and new $10 Pi Zero W that include Bluetooth 4.1.
Pi zero Wireless
If you take a look at our article on Implementation Types, the smartphone app or gateway in each scenario could equally be a SBC.
For sensing and RTLS applications, the SBC can do additional pre-processing to extract and/or filter sensor data. It can also do post processing to aggregate data and/or reformat for specific IoT platforms. Another advantage of a SBC over a gateway is that data can be cached when WiFi or Internet connectivity isn’t available and queued for sending later so that the data isn’t lost.
The starting place for evaluating use of Linux-based SBCs is usually the command line hcitool. This can be used to scan for and connect to beacons and save data to a file. There’s also a script available to scan and decode advertising data.
Implementations usually use the Bluez library that can be programatically accessed via languages such as c, Python and Javascript (node.js).