BEACONS

THE NEW REALITYby Andrea Bissoli

SAPIENZA UNIVERSITY of

ROME

Pervasive Systems Prof. Ioannis Chatzigiannakis

What is a beacon?

Estimote Beacon is a small computer:

It’s 32-bit ARM® Cortex M0 CPU

It has ACCELEROMETER, TEMEPERATURE sensor, and 2.4 GHz radio using Bluetooth 4.0 Smart, also known as BLE or Bluetooth low energy.

About BLT Signal

It’s a new standard developed by Nokia™, now implemented in all modern smartphones.

Since Bluetooth Smart doesn’t require pairing, a phone can listen to many beacons at the same time.  

Estimote Beacons have a NOMINAL range up to 70 meters.

1. THE PROTOCOLS

Some Clarity about Protocol and SDKs

Beacon is only a piece of hardware broadcasting radio signal. On top of that, there are different

APIs,

SDKs

and protocols that you’ll be using (unfortunately).

Three main types of Protocols

iBeacon (2013)

AltBeacon (2014)

Eddystone (2015)

Note: The first two have the same features, the last one is different. So we are going to see the differences.

SUMMARY

the Multi-Beacon CapabilityThis means that a single hardware beacon sends out multiple transmissions that can be used independently. 

Eddystone-UID

Eddystone-TLM

Eddystone-URL

Not all of these frames have to be used at the same time. In fact, beacons based on Eddystone can be configured to turn off some of these frames to save battery power or reduce noise.

Do I have to use Estimote SDK? What are the benefits? 1/2

Estimote Beacons: How to Set it?

2. DEMO

The BASE IDEA: Control Flow 1/2

Calculate how many people are in a place.

So, if one person (with its mobile phone) is close to Beacons, the app notices him/her and sends the information to a server.

If someone wants to know how many people are in this place can be checked it throught server.

The IDEA: Control Flow 2/2

The REAL IMPLEMENTATION

We would want to know

how many people there are in a library/ how many seatings are free

how many people follow the courses. We can use this information for the scheduling room of the next year.

THE BIG PROBLEM: TURN ON the BLUETOOTH

Generally, we don’t make another application, we can use university application (like infostud) and attach the module.

In this case, but also in all cases when we use a beacon we have to give something to the user. In the First case we can give library’s hours, library news

and so on.

In the second case the professor should spend some minutes of the lecture.

THE CODE..

BEACON REGION 1/2In my demo i have used the Estimote Default broadcasting packet and since it is iBeacon-compatible we have like apple standard the region formed by :

UUID - most commonly represented as a String.

Major - an unsigned short integer, (1–65535)

Minor - an unsigned short integer, (1–65535)

These three values serve for identify the beacon’s range

BEACON REGION 2/2

beaconManager = new BeaconManager(this); beaconManager.connect(new BeaconManager.ServiceReadyCallback() { @Override public void onServiceReady() { beaconManager.startMonitoring(new Region("monitored region", UUID.fromString("B9407F30-F5F8-466E-AFF9-25556B57FE6D"), 61272, 53723)); } });

MAIN METHOD 1/3

Monitoring can be thought of as a geofence: a virtual barrier, here defined by the range of beacon or a group of beacons. Going in(enter) and out(exit) of this range triggers events that application can react to.

MAIN METHOD 2/4beaconManager.setMonitoringListener(new BeaconManager.MonitoringListener() { @Override public void onEnteredRegion(Region region, List<Beacon> list) { //put the enter region logic here } @Override public void onExitedRegion(Region region) { //put the exit region logic here } });

MAIN METHOD 2/3 Ranging enables receiving more

comprehensive beacon data: identifiers and proximity estimates of the beacons in range.

beaconManager.setRangingListener(new BeaconManager.RangingListener() { @Override public void onBeaconsDiscovered(Region region,List<Beacon> list) { //put here the ranging listener logic } });

MAIN METHOD 3/3

Hint: ranging only when in range of beacons

Since ranging is much more energy-intensive than monitoring, it's a good practice to only do it when you know (thanks to monitoring) that you're in range of some beacons.

CountDownTimer

After 30 seconds the application sends some info to the server. The latter stored it and responses with the ID if the request is for registering(ID needs for unregistering), or with positive message if the request has been unregistered .

Download the apk 1/2If you want you can download the demo-app and we can try it together. The app was tested on Samsung s6 with Android 6.0.1

STEPS THAT MUST BE FOLLOWED1. Enable «Unknown Sources» in setting.2. Turn on the internet connection and

turn on the bluetooth.3. Click the button «Start Demo»4. Give it the general permission 5. Wait more or less 30 seconds.6. So we’ll check the result in my website.

Download the apk 1/2 link:

http://beaconcontrolflow.altervista.org/BeaconControlFlow.apk

or QrCode:

THE REAL PROJECTS

I will show few real project with beacon technology

LIST OF PROJECTS London Station for blind people (

Youtube video, article)

Romania (here)/Sud Tirol(search "tecnologia Beacon" in the page) Bus for blind people.

Museums (here)

Control flow in big event (blog article)

Navigator to enclosed spaces (here)

Thanks!

CREDITS AND LINKS Presentation template by

SlidesCarnival

Code available on Github

Presentation available on Slideshare

You can find me also on LinkedIn