
Apple iBeacons - shawndumas
http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/09/20/apple-ibeacons/
======
rada
I've implemented this as a hackathon project a month ago (an iPhone serving as
a broadcaster and an iPad serving as a receiver). It's an awesome technology
with a lot of promise but my one BIG gripe is the imprecision of RSSI. At
home, the proximity indicator was somewhat accurate. At the office the
proximity indicator was not accurate at all - half the time it would be good
but the other half it would show the unpredictbale/interchangeable RSSI
whether the receiver was at a yelling distance or a whispering distance.
(Maybe due to signal interference)?

If RSSI cannot be relied upon, it severely limits the utility of iBeacons. A
"binary" result (beacon found, beacon not found) can be useful but not near as
useful as a reliable distance indicator. For example, my goal for the
hackathon was to see if equipment in a lab could be activated by walking
around with your phone. If the phone cannot tell that I am closer to equipment
A than equipment B, then there is no point and moreover, we should not be
referring to this new technology as "micro locations".

Having said that, I know of a company here in Minneapolis piloting iBeacons as
indoor navigation (to find your way in a mall for example). I don't know if
their technology works because they've found a way to ensure more correct RSSI
readings, or if they are simply relying on the assumption that stores are far
enough apart.

~~~
Osmium
Since you've got some experience with it, do you have any idea how hard/easy
it'd be to get an iBeacon working from a Raspberry Pi equipped with a
Bluetooth dongle?

~~~
rada
I used Apple-provided bluetooth capabilities so my experience is probably not
particularly relevant to Raspberry Pi, sorry. One thing to think about is
battery life, unless you only need to pair the broadcaster and the receiver
once. What I mean is, if you have a listener that is constantly scanning for a
signal and doing some logic depending on the signal strength, you are bound to
have battery life as your biggest challenge and potentially a deal breaker to
any real use.

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karthikv
This gigaom post has more details on iBeacon:
[http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-
to-...](http://gigaom.com/2013/09/10/with-ibeacon-apple-is-going-to-dump-on-
nfc-and-embrace-the-internet-of-things/)

~~~
jgrahamc
_iBeacon’s range is 50 meters (typical Bluetooth range), or 2,500 square
meters._

That's some weird antenna right there. Assuming it's omnidirectional with a
50m range (radius) then it would cover more like 7,800 square meters.

 _The range of Estimote’s beacons is 50 meters, but the recommended range is
10 meters. If you go with the recommendation, you need 1 Estimote beacon for
every 100 square meters._

More like 314 square meters.

~~~
ISL
_> 2,500 square meters _

I'm not sure it's a weird antenna. Looks like the author took 50^2 (square
with edge length 50 m) instead of \pi 50^2 (the traditional interpretation of
50 m range).

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eddieroger
I'm so glad this is out of NDA. My coworker and I rushed through our lunches
at WWDC to play with this. The API is so easy, and possibilities of what it
can be used with are so broad. The immediate massive downside is that it's iOS
only. But, it's a relatively open spec, so porting some logic in a non-copied
way should be possible.

~~~
adestefan
It should be completely doable in Android 4.3, but you'll have to do it via
the Bluetooth API instead of a location API.

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mentos
I think its everyones dream to walk into a store, type what you're looking for
into your phone and see how far it is away from you.

How cheap would these have to be in order to make them cost effective to put
into every day product packaging?

And would too many of these near each other cause too much interference?

This would be a great way to cut the store out of the solution and just go
straight from product -> customer?

~~~
jonknee
> I think its everyones dream to walk into a store, type what you're looking
> for into your phone and see how far it is away from you.

Soon you won't even need to go to a store, the things you want will be dropped
off to your home or business...

~~~
mitchty
You mean like amazon prime? I'll admit amazon isn't always the cheapest, but
with subscriptions and whatnot, its way nicer to have things mailed to me.

That said the environmental impact of shipped boxes may not be better overall.
But damn is it convenient.

~~~
r00fus
Google Shopping Express puts Amazon Prime to shame. Same-day delivery, and
some of the pricing is cheaper than Amazon (some is more expensive). Selection
is, of course, more limited since it's just started this year.

It's bagged up, so less cruft than Amazon which has to worry about freight
delivery.

Neither does groceries, so I'm stuck with Safeway deliveries for that (which
hasn't been a completely stellar experience).

I would be singing the praises of InstaCart, but they happened to no want to
deliver to my area of the SF bay yet :)

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ZeroGravitas
This is informative:

[http://estimote.com/api/index.html](http://estimote.com/api/index.html)

Doesn't seem like there's a standard API yet.

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eddieplan9
Besides Estimote, another startup that provides dev kit including Bluetooth LE
Beacon and API is kontakt: [http://kontakt.io](http://kontakt.io)

~~~
mietek
Unfortunately, their pre-order link 404s.

~~~
cobrabyte
They're back online. I had visited them yesterday and got 404s , as well.

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projectileboy
For people pursuing this, it's worth looking back at the successes and
failures of Jini, from both technical and market perspectives.

~~~
melange
What specifically has Jini got to do with this?

~~~
projectileboy
Jini was trying to solve the same sorts of problems. I mention it because when
we look at a new technology, it's often instructive to look at older
technologies that were trying to solve the same (or similar) problems. In
particular, it's helpful to look at why they succeeded and why they failed.

For example, the "web services" community would have been well-served by
looking at the successes and failures of CORBA, since the web services folks
mostly replicated all the mistakes of CORBA.

~~~
twoodfin
Was that really an accident? I know many of the WS-* proponents liked to say,
"This new web-based technology will be so much simpler than that crufty old
CORBA junk." But in many cases it was the same companies with the same agendas
doing the design and standardization work, so it's not too surprising that the
result was more or less bound to go down the path of CORBA. The main
difference, and of course the main motivation, was a protocol that would run
on port 80 and have a chance to be "web-routable" through firewalls.

~~~
projectileboy
That's a really good point. Certainly the product vendors had the same
motivations. But at the time I was often disappointed when I listened to the
conversations of developers I worked with, because I rarely heard anyone draw
parallels between the two. It was frustrating to work on projects where we'd
be six months in and people would be surprised that the ORBs - er, I mean web
service platforms - had difficulties talking to one another.

~~~
spullara
It wasn't just the product vendors. The people on the two specs were also the
same. WS-* was literally the ex-CORBA contributors reimplementing all the same
stuff.

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Tyralen
There's another company with iBeacon style sensors that I've seen at ArtPrize
in Michigan called GeLo: www.gelosite.com

~~~
adestefan
There is also Tile ([http://www.thetileapp.com/](http://www.thetileapp.com/))
which is using them as a way of distributing the finding of lost things. It's
an interesting concept, but something I'd never do.

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justx1
Here is a good article that describes some scenarios that provide a glimpse
into iBeacon's potential:

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9242393/Why_Apple_s_i...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9242393/Why_Apple_s_indoor_GPS_plan_is_brilliant)

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lcusack
I have to imagine iBeacons could be more about the iwatch than the iPhone. I
don't want to take my phone out of my pocket all the time to check for new
notifications. I would glance at my watch.

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arpit
Can someone tell me how this compares to something like StickNFind?
[https://www.sticknfind.com/](https://www.sticknfind.com/)

~~~
jimiasty
StickNFind or Tile are designed to be sticked to moving objects in order to
estimate their location from owner phone.

Estimote is designed to be sticked to fixed location. Think about it as a
lighthouse that is broadcasting its presence and location, so smartphones and
other smart devices could estimate their relative location and get the
context.

~~~
joezydeco
So that implies that the app locating these fixed beacons needs some kind of
data backchannel to understand what it's seeing? Unless you have a cached map
of that particular store and it's beacons already in your device, right?

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outside1234
Does anyone know if there is an open version of these motes? And what phones
other than the iPhone support bluetooth low energy?

~~~
adestefan
See [http://www.bluetooth.com/Pages/Bluetooth-Smart-
Devices.aspx](http://www.bluetooth.com/Pages/Bluetooth-Smart-Devices.aspx)

The Galaxy S3 and S4 have home grown BLE stacks and Android 4.3 has finally
announced BLE support in the stack so it should show up on Android phones that
get the update (the hardware has been there for ages.) Blackberry 10 announced
support this summer.

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NKCSS
Isn't this just another spin on NFC?

~~~
skierscott
With greater range. NFC has a practical range of about 4cm; iBeacon has a
range of about 10-20m.

~~~
NKCSS
Ah, then it must be Bluetooth Low Energy.

~~~
Einherji
Correct, it's also not based on RFID like NFC is, and so can in theory be used
for a whole lot more.

~~~
mattschmulen
There are lots of cool things, easiest way to get started on the peripheral
side is to buy a TI Dev kit "Cow Bell" [http://www.ti.com/tool/cc2541dk-
sensor?DCMP=blestack_ota&HQS...](http://www.ti.com/tool/cc2541dk-
sensor?DCMP=blestack_ota&HQS=blestack_ota-pr-tf4) , its pretty cool.
Temperature sensor, Magnetometer, Humidity, Pressure etc. you will have to
flash it to support HID instead of GATT.

~~~
Einherji
This is awesome! I've been looking for something like this for a while, thanks
a lot for the tip.

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zengr
PayPal is building an iBeacon too for payments in store.

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melange
It's worth noting that iOS devices themselves can serve as beacons - so, for
example a payment terminal app running on an iPad can announce itself to
nearby iPhones.

~~~
jimiasty
Hi, this is Jakub, Co-founder of Estimote (YC S13).

That's correct and any iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) could be turned
into a beacon.

We have even developed a Virtual Beacon app you could already download from
the App Store and simulate beacon and proximity:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/estimote-virtual-
beacon/id68...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/estimote-virtual-
beacon/id686915066)

If one wants to pickup the Virtual Beacon's signals programmatically then our
API website could be helpful where we have included source code of few apps
[http://www.estimote.com/api](http://www.estimote.com/api)

