The recent Apple WWDC 19 announced SwiftUI, a new way to create user interfaces.
Paul Hudson of HackingWithSwift fame, has already created a new video showing Build an iBeacon detector with object binding and custom modifiers.
Category: iBeacon
Information Display and Alerting System Based on iBeacon
There’s new research on a An Intelligent Low-Power Displaying System with Integrated Emergency Alerting Capability. The authors have implemented a wireless ePaper system showing static and dynamic information together with indoor locating based on Bluetooth beacons .
Unfortunately, the locating system is based on an empty room and the technique would be liable to fluctuations in the physical environment.
Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)
Crowd Security with iBeacons
The UK Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) held a competition to find ideas to reduce the threat of terrorists in public spaces. KSharp created CriB, Crowd Resilience through iBeacons, a system using iBeacons to allow people to report terrorist threats and receive security alerts through an app. This allows venues such as city centres, shopping centres and sports stadiums to improve safety and security. A video has recently become available:
iBeacon Driven Mobile Device Management for Education
Jamf School is a device management solution for education. It allows you to track devices and see their status. It uses iBeacon to allow subject learning material to be unlocked when students enter specific areas.
The Jamf web site has some useful content on using iBeacons in education:
Invisible Candles: Exploring IT Applications of iBeacons with Your JSS
Paul Cowan—IT Manager at the University of Waikato explains iBeacons, how they have evolved, how museums are using iBeacons to share information with visitors and how the Casper Suite can be used trigger events and gather proximity data.
iBeacons in Education
Video webinar on proximity-based technology and how it can be used to distribute and manage technologies in education environments. Covers privacy considerations, casper suite and jamf.
See the Light (and benefits) of iBeacon
Video on how Apple’s iBeacon technology works and when you would want to use it.
The benefits of iBeacons for education
Article on using iBeacons for device management and unlocking learning materials.
Jamf also has many more blog posts on using iBeacons in Education.
Owntracks Location Tracking and Alerting
Owntracks is an open source app for iOS and Android that allows you to keep track of your (or vulnerable family member’s) location. However, it also has business uses to track valuable assets. You can also build a private location diary and share it with others.
It works with iBeacons to provide:
- Locating indoors where GPS doesn’t work
- Attributing location to a vehicle to track time spent commuting or to see where you have parked your car
- Fitting to keys/luggage/expensive equipment to get notified when you leave them behind
iBeacons For Disaster Assistance
The Singapore Space and Technology Association has partnered with Airbus to launch a HADR (Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief) challenge. The objectives are to use latest technologies to aid rescue efforts.
Lee Wei Wen and Lee Wei Juin propose the use of iBeacon to display the GNSS locations of the rescuers with live updates of the rescue plan across different agencies:
New MacOS iBeacon Programs
There’s a new GitHub Swift source code project, cbeacon, that implements a command line program that transmits iBeacon advertisements. It works on macOS 10.12 or greater.
The author is also the author of another application, BeaconFinder, written in objective-c, that provides GUI tool for detecting iBeacons:
What is iBeacon Technology?
We sometimes get asked “What is iBeacon Technology?”. In terms of the beacon itself, iBeacon doesn’t imply much. The underlying Bluetooth does most of the hard work. iBeacon is only one of many possible formats of standard Bluetooth advertising.
The iBeacon advertising consists of three identifiers UUID, major and minor. We have an article explaining how these are usually set up.
The more useful functionality is in iOS itself. Apps can declare an interest in particular beacons and be triggered even when the app is not running. The triggering is usually used to cause a notification on the phone that the user can tap on to do more. If the app is already open, it can look for beacons and display appropriate app content.
Android may also trigger and scan for iBeacons but this is in the context of scanning for Bluetooth advertising as opposed to specific iBeacons.
Learn More
iBeacons For Apple Passkit
A little known, under-promoted use of iBeacons is with Apple Passkit. Passkit allows you to create and distribute things like coupons, boarding passes, store cards, event tickets, promotions, offers or just information that can end up in the built-in iOS Wallet app. After adding a pass into the wallet, a user can get a notification about the pass when they are near an iBeacon associated with the pass, all without installing an app. There are lots of uses particularly in retail, events and hospitality.
The Apple developer documentation explains how the Wallet works and the passkit reference shows the iBeacon related set up fields.
An important thing to realise is that the beacon doesn’t send the pass to the smartphones. They just cause the triggering. You need to provide a mechanism, usually via a web site, where users can download the pass from your web server. Your server must be secure (HTTPS) and use a SSL certificate from a known certificate authority. Self-signed certificates won’t work. You will also have to set your server to serve the application/vnd.apple.pkpass MIME type when hosting the pass file.
There’s a useful example by Tom Harrington who shows how he created a Passbook Business Card. If you are not a technical person and it all looks too complicated, PassKit Inc (nothing to do with Apple) have a platform based on Apple Wallet.
Apple Passkit works with all iBeacons.
Make Your Mac Advertise iBeacon
Want to experiment with beacons without buying one? There’s a new command line tool mBeacon that allows you to set up your Mac to advertise iBeacon.
You use by typing the following command:
$ mbeacon -uuid "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX" -major 0 -minor 0
The ability to easily change the UUID, major and minor is also useful for development purposes where you wish to test, for example, an app that’s looking for lots of different beacons.