Did you just walk past my beacon? Read all about it here!
Someone at work has loaned me a beacon, it might be useful in place of the RFID nonsense that has been failing to work.
In case I leave this as the target url for this beacon, really it belongs to Connor Meredith1.
A beacon is a small physical device that does one thing, it broadcasts a short over bluetooth. The original ibeacon by Apple could broadcast only its own unique ID, then someone who is passing by who has some software that knows about the beacon could perform some task. Usually I think this would be for advertising purposes, so you have an app on your phone and when you walk past the IKEA beacon by their front door it can say "hey Paul, welcome back, remember to come and get your free cup of tea", or when you walk past the beacon in the lighting dept it can say "yeah I know you're looking at the lights, here's some more info". You could say it's a bit creepy.
It seems to have been extended by Google who are going under the project name Eddystone. I've installed the app on my phone, so I'll see what it does. Maybe finding beacons could be like the new geocaching?
Here's the best place to find out about it2.
The beacon itself has a battery in it, it should be very low energy usage and should last a while. I've just reprogrammed Connor's beacon to point to this page, so if your phone suggested you come here maybe you just walked past it. More likely he'll point it back to his github account1 again. Lots of people are doing this at conferences apparently.
It's a bit fiddly to reprogramme, you have to take the battery out of thsi one, but maybe there's a use for it. Not sure we can use it to replace the RFID idea I'm working on.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in Hythe in the deep South. Wed + dad to 2, I am a full stack web engineer, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, other languages etc. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.