Did you try the random beacon to see if God talked. Yeah, you might want to go ahead and do that, dumb fuck.
AltBeacon
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: AltBeacon
#12Does anyone know if this appears as an iBeacon to iOS devices? You can get iOS devices to listen for other BLE advertisers (or advertise their UUID) in the background (even after the app is closed due to memory pressure) but I haven't been able to make it survive a phone reboot. If anyone can get that working please let me know.
AltBeacon will not register as a CoreLocation Beacon on an iOS device. Full disclosure: I work for Radius Networks.
So how do I deal with supporting both Android and iOS from a single Beacon?
Re: AltBeacon
#13It would appear that iBeacons just broadcast a uuid that clients can discover, and then clients are able to lookup the location of the device from a database. I don't have in depth knowledge of iBeacons, but after skimming the spec, it would appear that this does the same thing, so I feel like I am missing something. How does this differ?
> How does this differ?
Fundamentally, it doesn't.
AltBeacon (as far as I can tell) exists simply so Apple has a harder time using their bullying legal tactics against people.
Specifically, the folks behind AltBeacon (RadiusNetworks) previously made an open source Android library that allowed Android apps to easily detect and use iBeacons.
Apple threw their lawyers on them, and they pulled the Android library. Presumably, Apple will have a harder time being a bad citizen against AltBeacon.
Re: AltBeacon
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
AltBeacon will not register as a CoreLocation Beacon on an iOS device. Full disclosure: I work for Radius Networks.
So how do I deal with supporting both Android and iOS from a single Beacon?
I believe the easiest approach would be to broadcast both formats.
Re: AltBeacon
#15But how is iBeacon proprietary anyway? It's just a static BLE advertisment of a UUID. Anyone can do that.
I think these guys had a bunch of ibeacon utilities for ios and osx, as well as detailed docs on the protocol online, but they were recently pulled, at least from homebrew. Did Apple intervene?
Re: AltBeacon
#16But how is iBeacon proprietary anyway? It's just a static BLE advertisment of a UUID. Anyone can do that.
The spec for iBeacon is proprietary and the name is trademarked (http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:h5e...).
IIRC, Apple even went so far as to revoke iBeacon usage from companies that tried to make an Android library (Radius Networks, the creators of this spec, being one of them).
Re: AltBeacon
#17I'm not seeing anything on the community leadership, board, voting etc. The only references I see are to Radius Networks. So, the way I read the mission statement is: We [Radius Networks] firmly believe that an open specification would help everyone, and we [Radius Networks] want to do it right. This is simply the proposal, now we [Radius Networks] would like feedback from the community.
This is something we at Radius Networks are trying to figure out. We've been committed to open source for a while and wanted to get the proposal published -- but are actively researching how to properly establish this spec. Do you have examples of organizations or communities that have good answers to your questions?
I've done quite a lot of thinking about how governance boards could work (or not) for mobile-based projects.
The short answer is that sitting on a governance board takes time and effort, and mobile developers at large aren't really convinced of the benefit (relative, to, say, the Debian advisory boards).
To overcome this you'd need to recruit from people invested in the problem. Probably your competitors.
Re: AltBeacon
#18The biggest problem with Beacons is that the range is unpredictable. Without a better handle on proximity, many of the use cases I can immediately think of are of no greater benefit than GPS or WiFi nodes. It's a shame, because there are some amazing things you can do once you are able to start exchanging data based on passing a node by (< 3 meters)
Why is this being downvoted? It's exactly right. The distance to beacons is extremely unpredictable. Just holding the phone or a beacon in your hand slightly differently is often enough to make the estimated distance change by 10m.
And yes, it's a huge barrier to usefulness.
Re: AltBeacon
#19Can anyone explain why a random beacon ID is better than just using something like a URL? That would provide not only uniqueness with an existing and fair registry, but also an implicit way of getting basically unlimited information about a beacon.
You stick a beacon on a bus stop sign that broadcasts "mt.obcn.org/XXXXXXXXXX" where MetroTransit owns mt.obcn.io and XXXXXXXXXX is the bus stop id and querying that URL returns a JSON blob about that bus stop.
Re: AltBeacon
#20Can anyone explain why a random beacon ID is better than just using something like a URL? That would provide not only uniqueness with an existing and fair registry, but also an implicit way of getting basically unlimited information about a beacon. You stick a beacon on a bus stop sign that broadcasts "mt.obcn.org/XXXXXXXXXX" where MetroTransit owns mt.obcn.io and XXXXXXXXXX is the bus stop id and querying that URL r…
Simple answer: Available advertising space.
The identifier field in the iBeacon spec is a 16-byte UUID and no longer than that, AltBeacon has a 20-byte space but its because it includes an unstructured major, minor (compared to iBeacon). If your example was to be represented it would be 22-byte in length which is outside the bounds available — granted that I took the number of X literally and could be shortened multiple ways.
Moreover, the UUID is described as a region identifier where, in your scenario, all the beacons for the bus company would have the same region identifier but each individual beacon representing a stop would have an individual major and minor identifier (2-byte each) to uniquely identify that particular stop. So the way in which the iBeacon spec and somewhat AltBeacon are authored don't really allow for that kind of implementation because of the limitations imposed by the small advertising packet space. Its intended that the identifier space be used for something like a UUID with a set of supporting identifiers (major, minor).
As you can see from the AltBeacon spec diagram; there is only 28-bytes available for advertisable data on a Bluetooth Smart peripheral. So there is not a lot of room to play with.