iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Sparrow is an open source Graphical Bluetooth and WiFi Analyzer for Linux. It provides a 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum view, listens for Bluetooth LE advertising and tracks advertisement or iBeacons advertisement sources. It can also be used to advertise iBeacon.
Sparrow is useful for advanced users who need to diagnose more advanced problems related to interference or which part of a system isn’t working.
Scapy is a useful command line Python program, that works on Linux, that enables the user to send, sniff and dissect network packets, including Bluetooth LE. It can be used for testing, development and security testing.
Scapy allows:
There’s a useful tool called bettercap that claims to be the “Swiss Army knife for WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy, wireless HID hijacking and Ethernet networks reconnaissance and MITM attacks”.
While you might want to use it to test Bluetooth LE security, a more interesting use is for debugging Bluetooth LE. If you are scanning for advertising or creating or using GATT, for example with a beacon, it’s sometimes useful to have a separate way of exercising Bluetooth LE.
Bettercap is written in Go and runs on GNU/Linux, BSD, Android, Apple macOS and the Microsoft Windows. However, a bug in Windows and macOS prevents the Bluetooth commands from working. Hence, it’s for Linux or Android only.
Better caps runs in the browser and you can create scripts.
UPDATE: There’s a tutorial on Medium.
The Go programming language, also known as Golang, is a simpler version of C without dynamic memory allocation making it easier and safer to use. The language was invented and is in use at Google.
The go-bluetooth library extends Go to allow it to communicate with Bluetooth devices. Your can pair, discover, communicate via GATT and manage the underlying hci/Bluetooth service.
There’s a new command line Python-based utility for Linux called Bleah that describes itself as a “BLE scanner for smart devices hacking”. Don’t let the ‘hacking’ part put you off – all it does is scan for devices and enumerate/use Bluetooth GATT Service much like the many apps for iOS and Android like Nordic nRF Connect. Nevertheless, it’s useful should you need to do these things from Linux rather than mobile apps.
If you use this utility (or mobile apps) you need to be aware that most Beacons are not connectable by default and most have password protected Bluetooth Services preventing you writing to them without having written the password to a specific Service. You will need to read the documentation for the beacon to determine how to make it connectable and to ascertain the default password.
One of the difficulties of developing Beacon applications on (usually Linux) single single board computers (SBCs) is the difficulty in programming Bluetooth LE. We previously gave a few pointers.
To make things much easier, there’s a new pure Python module python-hcipy written using only the Python standard library for interacting with the Bluetooth HCI.
“The primary benefit of using this module is the lack of having any dependency on: PyBluez Python & C based module, the bluetoothd service or D-Bus; this module just uses the standard Python socket API.”
It currently supports BLE Adapter controller and querying, advertising, GATT Client (Central role),GATT Server (Peripheral role) and scanning.
Beacons don’t just work with smartphones. They can work with any other devices that have Bluetoooth LE. This includes Single Board Computers (SBCs) such as the Raspberry Pi 3 and new $10 Pi Zero W that include Bluetooth 4.1.
Pi zero Wireless
If you take a look at our article on Implementation Types, the smartphone app or gateway in each scenario could equally be a SBC.
For sensing and RTLS applications, the SBC can do additional pre-processing to extract and/or filter sensor data. It can also do post processing to aggregate data and/or reformat for specific IoT platforms. Another advantage of a SBC over a gateway is that data can be cached when WiFi or Internet connectivity isn’t available and queued for sending later so that the data isn’t lost.
The starting place for evaluating use of Linux-based SBCs is usually the command line hcitool. This can be used to scan for and connect to beacons and save data to a file. There’s also a script available to scan and decode advertising data.
Implementations usually use the Bluez library that can be programatically accessed via languages such as c, Python and Javascript (node.js).