how to detect beacon signal and do we need to make any app to manage it or any predefined app or site is available?
I want to know how Beacon works and which Beacon is suitable for retail.
You need a mobile phone with Bluetooth 4.0 to detect beacons. They emit a BLE signal which is a little different from the normal Bluetooth signal. There are many generic apps in the play store and maybe in the app store to detect them.
But if you are looking for real functionality related to that, then you'll be needing the retail store-specific mobile app so that it can show you relevant updates in the app.
Related
I want to write an app that when installed makes the smartphone broadcast a unique string to other smartphones using the app. So the app shall broadcast and check for broadcasts constantly in the background while not draining to much energy. I'd like to implement the app in Flutter. So if you could suggest a plugin or a native android/ios api that is suited for this usecase I would greatly appreciate it.
I'm using an app that uses Bluetooth low energy to scan and detect devices however it does not detects other phones
is there a specific way on flutter to make it detect other mobile phones
You can only detect BLE devices that are advertising their services. A mobile phone often does not do that on its own. There are two solutions:
Use an already available app on the other device to advertise some service. One of the possible apps I personally use is nRF Connect, another one would be BLE Peripheral.
This might not be sufficient depending on your project and goal this might not be sufficient. If you need some specific service or characteristic that can't be generated by pre-existing apps you have to develop your own app for advertising. This would be possible with flutter_ble_peripheral (limited functionality on iOS)
I'm building a progressive web application (target is smart phones for now). The app needs to be able to access heart rate and heart rate variability, ideally in real-time. While it seems totally asinine, I'm open to using REST calls to some remote server if that is the only way. I'm also fine with restricting the app to only work with certain hardware if necessary. In this case, the ideal hardware would be some sort of earbud that uses optics to scan for heart rate, but at this point, I'm open...
The best that I have thought up is to find a heart rate monitor that converts the direct signal into audio and use the microphone web API. That seems like a lot more work than ideal, so I'm hoping someone has a better idea. Any ideas are welcome. Please, no one downvote anyone if it doesn't solve all my constraints. I've been working on this for a bit and I'm not sure that there is a clean and perfect solution yet. Thanks in advance!
If the sensor can speak Bluetooth, the Web Bluetooth API can perhaps help: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetooth_API
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/07/interact-with-ble-devices-on-the-web
How about use a Web Bluetooth that lets you control any Bluetooth Low Energy device like heart rate monitors. It will read the Service Location Characteristics (which tells your where the sensor is placed - which body part) and subscribe to notifications from the Heart Rate Characteristics, meaning you will get an event whenever the device performs a new measurement. Then use a service worker that will define the behavior of the app to mimic native app capabilities like offline support and notifications.
It's like a Physical Web that you can send a link to your website from a Bluetooth beacon to a user's device and with PWA, that link can be to your web app that looks, feels and functions like a native app. Then with Web Bluetooth, you can then speack to the device. Visit this blog post for more details.
I'm currently study BLE Beacon. I know that with Google Beacon API and its app, it is possible to know when the beacon communicates with my mobile phone, so I can design different notifications based on the proximity. But in my case, I need to know the proximity between a wearable beacon to a stable beacon. Is that possible at all?
Two challenges to doing this:
Google Beacon APIs do not provide proximity information beyond a beacon being visible at all (regardless of distance) to a mobile phone.
Beacons are generally speaking one way transmitters. You cannot use a beacon to listen for another beacon.
To make something like this work you need one of the two devices (either fixed or mobile) to be a beacon scanner, not a beacon. You could make a beacon scanner out of a fixed Raspberry Pi 3 which would detect the beacon wearables and calculate the distance to them. This is an approach I have helped multiple clients implement.
We can make iOS devices act as a iBeacon transmitter and We can locate nearby iBeacons if we know their Proximity UUID.
With Google's Proximity Beacon API, It's possible to configure and register real Beacon hardware, and we can locate them with Nearby Messaging API.
But is it possible to make iOS devices to broadcast as Eddystone Beacons ? And it needs to be discoverable by apps that scan Eddystone beacons.
Thanks in advance.
Unfortunately, this is not possible. While iOS devices can advertise Bluetooth LE service advertisements(which are the advertisement type used by Eddystone) using CoreBluetooth APIs, you cannot attach the necessary data. This is because the CBAdvertisementDataServiceDataKey that associates service data to an advertisement is read-only on iOS. You can't set the data.
So while you want to make the iOS device advertise something like this to transmit Eddystone-UID:
0201060303aafe1516aafe00e72f234454f4911ba9ffa6000000000001
You end up advertising something like this:
0201060303aafe0316aafe
This leaves off the Eddystone-UID type code (00), the calibrated power (e7), the namespace identifier (2f234454f4911ba9ffa6) and the instance identifier (000000000001). As a result, it won't be recognized as an Eddystone-UID frame.