Radbeacon dot configuration code#
Radbeacon dot configuration simulator#

iOS's Core Location Services then allow me to just monitor for the UUID by itself as a single region. The trick to this is to use the same UUID across my beacons, but different major and minor values.

How can I search for 100 individual beacons when iOS only allows 20? This does present a problem for 'Chris's Emporium' as with a recent expansion I now have over 100 stores (knick-knacks are hot!), which will mean 100 beacons each with their own UUID+major+minor 'region' configuration. While this limit may change in the future, it's possible to see Apple's thinking here, they don't want numerous apps on the one mobile device searching for 1000s of beacons draining the device's battery. However, there is a reported limit to iOS that it can only search for 20 regions at any one time. If you can imagine, say, I run a range of knick-knack stores called 'Chris's Emporium' where customers enter each store in different shopping centers identified by their own unique beacon, the goal would be to ping customers from my app a unique message for that store such as a sale or voucher to entice the customer to enter and buy, buy, buy.Ī nuance of iBeacons is that iOS can monitor for a specific beacon by its UUID+major+minor identifiers, each combination of values referred to in iOS terminology as a 'region'. The Sample CaseĪs mentioned earlier my goal was to build a simple app that when it detects the beacon to be in range of my phone, my app raises a message. Of importance for later in this article is the UUID and major-minor values which identifies the specific beacon.įrom here to turn the beacon off again, one click it flashes red, then one click to turn it back on so it starts advertising/transmitting (and of course remember to turn it off at some point too). Then with the RadBeacon companion app available for iPhones & Android, I could see the beacon and its unique identifiers. This is done by putting the Dot in admin mode by clicking twice and holding the second click for 5 seconds, upon where the Dot will flash green twice. To start working with the Dot I needed to access its various identifiers which the app listens for. RadBeacon Dot's are turned on with one click and they will flash once green.

Instead for my testing purposes, I selected a relatively inexpensive RadBeacon Dot which allowed me to cleanly separate the beacon from the app I'll build to run on my phone.

Radbeacon dot configuration simulator#

Unfortunately, the iOS Simulator does not support a simulated iBeacon.Īn alternative is you can setup an iPhone as a beacon itself but in thinking about this, it seemed like too much hassle as I wanted to run both the pseudo-beacon on my phone and the beacon monitoring app at the same time. When building an iOS app developers typically rely on the iOS Simulator for testing. What Is an iBeacon?įor anyone reading this article out of curiosity and wondering what an iBeacon is, there are plenty of articles available to discuss the concept including a generalized article from Wikipedia, a technical article from MBed that discusses the differences between iBeacons, altBeacons and Eddystone, and an article about how beacons are slowly being adopted into airports as a real use case example.Īs this article is specifically about detecting beacons on iOS, I'll focus on iOS's support for Apple's iBeacon standard going forward. So with these two ideas in mind, rather than just creating a demo I thought it would be a good chance to address the common request for more information by writing this article and sharing it on DZone for other's to benefit.

Radbeacon dot configuration code#

In addition NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescriptionone of my goals was to not hard code the beacon identifier and message in the app, but instead dynamically derive messages from a beacon cloud registry. This is a pretty common use case for beacons, but in building this I did discover that iOS's CoreLocation library doesn't make this entirely simple in the way that it raises events on our mobile user entering and exiting the beacon's range. This week's demo de jour (French was never my forté) is an iOS Swift iBeacon app designed to show a message when, say, our mobile user approaches a beacon identifying a theoretical shop 'Chris's Emporium'. In creating many proof-of-concept mobile apps and then presenting the apps at various events, we often get thanks from the audience but 'can you please give me an article I can read to learn from your research and see how you solved the problem?'