Kevin Beacon

No, not the actor from Footloose, but my first prototype with iBeacons.

My first major development project at Applico was working on an in-house prototype using Apple iBeacon technology introduced in the iOS 7 API. iBeacons are Bluetooth low-energy one-way transmitters that broadcast a signal with a unique string ID. Using Apple’s CoreLocation APIs, developers can write iOS apps that look for this unique signal. As a device enters the range of the beacon, an app can then notify the user that it has entered the range of a beacon, and can update the app or send a push notification accordingly. With Bluetooth 4.0, iOS developers can use Bluetooth technology without the need for device-to-device authentication.

Kevin Beacon

The iOS development team brainstormed and designed a beacon use-case for an electronic valet parking payment system. Each valet would have an iBeacon emitter broadcasting a unique ID specific to that valet. When this valet app detected a signal, it would send the unique valet identifier to a backend, and the name of the valet and the price of parking would be returned to the app. The app would then alert the user that they are in range of a valet, and would give the user the option to register their vehicle and pay for parking. If the user opted to park at that valet, their vehicle and payment info would be sent to another data store specific to that valet, expediting the valet payment process exponentially. No claim ticket or cash would be required of the user, everything would be done electronically through the app.

RaspberryPi

To implement this use case, I used a Raspberry Pi device running Raspbian Wheezy and a Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongle as my beacon emitter. I configured and compiled the BlueZ Bluetooth libraries on the hardware, and set the device to broadcast a unique UUID signal. I then wrote an iPhone application to look for that unique signal, and created a data store in Kinvey to hold valet and vehicle information. We chose to use a Raspberry Pi for our beacon emitter for several reasons. The device can stay online for several weeks without any slowdowns or hardware failures. Raspberry Pi hardware is also relatively cheap. A valet could purchase several devices with Bluetooth dongles to broadcast around a garage for less than the cost of a laptop or tablet with Bluetooth technology.

In addition to the Raspberry Pi emitter, we also built a simple iPad app to broadcast a beacon signal. Any device running iOS 6 or later can interact with this Bluetooth low-energy technology. The potential to use iBeacon technology for local location-based tracking and services is huge, and I am excited to continue explore and work with this technology.

Source code to this project and instructions on setting up the Raspberry Pi are available here.

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Filed under: Applico in the Press | Topics: engineering, iBeacon