In my app I get the information of the beacons with CoreLocation and and the LocationManager.
I've set the advertising interval of the beacons to 200ms.
Is it possible to call the didRangeBeacons delegate method faster, so that i get the values of the advertising package according to the advertising interval of the beacon?
No, you cannot alter the frequency of the didRangeBeacons:inRegion callback, which is 1 Hz regardless of the beacon advertising frequency.
You can get callbacks for each beacon advertisement (every 200 ms in your case) using CoreBluetooth APIs, but there are a couple of restrictions:
It will not work with iBeacon transmissions as iOS blocks access to iBeacon advertisement data in CoreBluetooth. You can use AltBeacons, which are iBeacon compatible, and get the more frequent updates with those. You can buy beacons that send out both iBeacon and AltBeacon transmissions.
It will only work in the foreground. You cannot get Bluetooth LE manufacturer advertisements in the background on iOS.
Full disclosure: I am Chief Engineer at Radius Networks which sponsors the open source AltBeacon standard.
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I am building an app in swift that helps me detect beacons and display their RSSI values. I was using the native CoreLocations library from apple to detect beacons but noticed that the rate of detection is set to 1 second and it cannot be changed. Is there a way to reduce the detection interval to say 100-500ms so that I can get more RSSI values?
You can also use CoreBluetooth APIs to detect beacons, which give you a separate RSSI measurement for each packet detected. For a beacon advertising at 10 times per second, this would give you an RSSI update approximately every 100ms.
There are two big catches to using CoreBluetooth:
It cannot detect iBeacon because Apple blocks it. CoreBluetooth can detect AltBeacon and Eddystone.
The API is harder to use with beacons — you have to parse out the identifiers from the packets manually.
Also, be aware that the RSSI value returned by CoreLocation once per second is actually an average based on all packets received over the previous second, so it is more stable than individual samples taken at a higher frequency. Depending on what you want the samples for, you may find the higher variation is a problem.
Finally, be aware that the max rate at which you get samples with CoreBluetooth depends on the beacon transmission rate. Some beacons advertise only once per second. If you are working with such a beacon, you will not get any more samples with CoreBluetooth.
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.
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.
I would like to develop app which detects a lot of beacon device withoud knowing uuid.
However I cannot find way to do this in internet.
I have to define uuid in code.
So is there way to detect iBeacon without knowing uuid?
I know CoreLocation requires you to know the UUID of the beacon you are CBCentralManager, which handles all of the bluetooth spectrum. It has methods for scanning for bluetooth devices. I don't have an iBeacon handy at the moment to test and see if it picks them up, but it is probably worth a try.
The nomenclature used is quite important here. If you want to detect 'iBeacon', then you need to at least know the UUID of the device or devices you're looking for. That's because, in the iBeacon standard, the ID is the only piece of information included in the advertising packet. iBeacon lets you do two things: monitoring and ranging (detecting whether there is an iBeacon in range, and detecting how close the iBeacon is), and both require you to know the UUID.
If you just want to look for beacons, without including the iBeacon properties and features, you can use Core Bluetooth to do that. SDKs of particular beacon vendors base their beacon maintenance features (firmware updates, settings changing) on that. This method is also used by vendors that use their own protocols alongside Apple's iBeacon. We do that at Estimote with Estimote Stickers, and AFAIK Gimbal does this as well.
Cheers.