We feed beacon fat herds

So how many of them have multiplied! Wherever you turn on the sniffer - the crowd, the herd. But it can be said that a lost herd. How to find them? What to do with them? How to put them in the service of a man?

Beacon is a sleeping volcano. There are a lot of them on air, and only a little bit is used in the case. Each Bluetooth Low Energy device is a beacon until it connects to another.

The radio-technical perversions shown below may help save the herds of lost beacons. Or at least give you a little technological pleasure.

And the pleasure in the fashionable style of the AR now - augmented reality.

First things first. Beacon came up with Apple to take over the world. After it, the Beacons were invented by everyone else. Everyone has come up with their own, so they are poorly compatible with each other. The main innovation of beacons - work without connection and identification. This, firstly, makes it possible to take them all at once, and, secondly, it saves energy and, most importantly, makes the energy resource of beacons predictable. Accordingly, the small size and long service life.

On Habré, much has been written about these beacons: here , here and here . And, probably, there are many. I will not repeat.

For me, as a direction finder, these properties are the best gifts. Well, how to make such a thing to bearing these radio-fleas!

At first, however, the WiFi direction finder appeared. The antenna in it is exactly as needed for beacons, the frequencies are the same. And each WiFi access point is in fact always a beacon, but in the standard WiFi, of course. Who are interested in technical details, you can read here . The main feature here is in the antenna. Or rather, in antennas, there are two of them. And the difference between them is direction finding.

In the WiFi direction finder, it was only necessary to replace our favorite ESP8266 with the equally favorite nRF51822, and it became for beacons. After easy editing, the mobile software began to show all the same pictures as on WiFi.

Now it was necessary to experience everything on the "ground". Massively and uniformly beacons are used in indoor-positioning. As I thought, it is not so easy to find a real system of indoor-navigation even in big St. Petersburg. (Although maybe I was looking badly, tell me, please) I had to go from the north of St. Petersburg to the south, to the TRC RIO. He was pleased with his simplicity, there is only one floor. Beacons hang on the columns of the corridor and are clearly visible.

Sniffer showed the presence of a large number of beacons from Kontakt.io. This is one of the first manufacturers of beacons.

We uncover the instrument of radio-technical pleasure:

And go graze the beacons. We find the first available one, locate it in augmented reality, write it into the Firebase database of beacons under a logical name.

Then the next one.

And do the exercises.

It would be possible to make the process of accounting for beacons more automatic. One could even memorize the 3D scene thanks to the Google Tango technology built into the gadget. But we must leave some pleasure for the future.

Sources of mobile software can be viewed on Github .