BEACONS — Discover Use Cases
What is a Beacon?
Beacons are one-way transmitters that are used to mark important places and objects. Typically, a beacon is visible to a user’s device from a range of a few meters, allowing for highly context-sensitive use cases. The Google beacon platform is designed to make it easy to incorporate these kinds of use cases into your own apps and venues, whether or not you maintain a widely distributed app.
For example, a smart bus stop can transmit, route schedules, a shop can send discounts info, a museum can air the timetable of exhibitions, and so on. A message transmitted as a notification can contain a link to some web page.
The starting point of the Beacons movement is considered for the development of iBeacons by Apple, announced in 2013. Beacons are the devices supporting the Bluetooth Low Energy technology. Their task is simple — serially send data packages (advertisement packets).
Why do we say “BLE beacons”?
BLE stands for Bluetooth Low Energy. It’s a power-efficient version of Bluetooth originally introduced in 2010. BLE’s low energy needs are vital to beacons, as it allows them to run for years on tiny coin-cell batteries. It also consumes far less energy than the old and clunky Bluetooth. In fact, BLE is a major driver in the IoT, allowing technology to last longer with smaller parts.
Using the beacon platform, including Google Proximity Beacon API and Eddystone, you can:
- Enable your apps to react to the user’s context through beacon attachments.
- Monitor the status of a fleet using the Eddystone telemetry frame, and the diagnostics endpoint.
- Leverage the Physical Web.
The Google Proximity Beacon API can be used to register any beacon that supports one of the following specifications:
- Eddystone
- iBeacon
- AltBeacon
Components
The Google beacon platform consists of the following components:
- Eddystone, the open beacon format from Google that works with Android and iOS.
- Nearby API for Android and iOS, managing beacon scanning for your own app.
- A Proximity Beacon API for integrating with Google products and your own app.
This packet consists of the following parts:
- The 3-component beacon ID:
- UUID — 16 byte. For example, your company ID, retail store ID, etc.
- Major — 2 byte. The city ID where your company/store is located.
- Minor — 2 byte. The GPS coordinates of a specific venue.
- TX Power:1 byte. This is a paragon of the signal strength. The paragon is the signal strength at the distance of 1 meter from the beacon. Measures in dBm.
- Battery life: Most beacons start with an 18–24 month battery life. However, some beacons with certain requirements and uses last some 6–8 months. Beacons with energy-saving capabilities can last over 5 years.
- Interval: How often can the beacon transmit its message? How often you need your beacon to transmit depends on your specific scenario. (ms=millisecond)
- Sensors: Now, beacons are coming out with extra capabilities. They may include accelerometers, light or movement sensors.
- Price: Beacons can cost as little as $5. Will such a cheap beacon be worth it? Well, that really depends on what you want, but many users will find that ultra-cheap beacons simply don’t get the job done. Expect one ordinary beacon to run $15–25.
The iBeacon solution was only fit for iOS. Android had to use third-party libraries (like the Android beacon library).
What is Eddystone?
Eddystone is an open beacon format from Google that works with Android and iOS. The process of setting up a beacon to broadcast (sometimes called ‘provisioning’) can be completed using Google’s Beacon Tools app for Android and iOS, using a tool from your manufacturer, or sometimes in bulk by prior arrangement with the beacon manufacturer.
Beacons can be deployed at fixed places such as airports, museums, and bus stops, and attached to movable objects such as bicycles, kiosks, and taxis.
In July of 2015, Google announced Eddystone- an open format for Bluetooth beacons. This technology is also compatible with iOS, as the packet format is similar to the iBeacon one. Eddystone can cast 4 types of packets:
- Eddystone-UID. This is the same identifier, an analog of iBeacon (UUID, Major, Minor). Eddystone-UID consists of the two parts:
- Namespace ID (10 byte)
- Instance ID (96 byte)
- Eddystone-EID pseudo-randomly changes its 8-byte AES-encrypted identifier with a developer-set average life period every few minutes. As for the rest, it acts similarly to the UID frame.
- Eddystone-TLM telemetry accesses such data as battery capacity, battery charge level, gadget temperature, and the number of packets sent.
- Eddystone-URL transmits the URL to a website protected by means of SSL. This beacon is the base of the Physical Web technology. URL limit is 10 byte.
For the complex operations using beacons, Google developed a number of independent solutions under the unified Google’s Beacon Platform. It includes the Eddystone format, the Beacon Dashboard monitoring, and management system, and the APIs for beacons interaction (like Google Proximity Beacon API, Nearby Messages API, and Places API).
Proximity Beacon API
The Proximity Beacon API allows you to interact with Google’s cloud registry of beacons. Registering your beacons with Google allows you to:
- Manage information associated with your beacon network remotely, in real time.
- Share information associated with your beacons with other projects.
- Allow Google products to react to your beacon network.
- Take advantage of power-efficient beacon scanning (including background scans) using Nearby.
In addition to currently launched beacon integrations, registering your beacons with Google will make it easy to take advantage of new Google products as they are announced.
Ways to use beacons
Most of the use cases for beacons fall under one of the following categories:
Receiving Nearby Messages and Notifications
You can add attachments to your beacons, and access those attachments as messages, with your own app using Nearby Messages and Nearby Notifications, which does not require your app to be installed. Since the messages are stored in the cloud, you can update them as often as you like without the need to update the beacons themselves.
Interacting with the Physical Web
The Physical Web enables quick, seamless interaction with beacons. If you want your beacon to link to a single web page, you can broadcast Eddystone-URL frames. This compressed URL can be read by Nearby Notifications, and by Chrome using the Physical Web. Note that beacons configured using Eddystone-URL can’t be registered with Google’s beacon registry.
Integrating with Google services
When your beacons are registered with Google, the Places API uses fields such as latitude and longitude coordinates, indoor floor level, and Google Places Place_ID as signals to improve location detection accuracy automatically.
But what is a beacon like on the inside?
What do they look like? Beacons are very small, simple devices. If you crack one open, you won’t find thirty motherboards and oodles of wires. You’ll find a CPU, radio, and batteries. Beacons often use small lithium chip batteries (smaller and more powerful than AA batteries) or run via connected power like USB plugs. They come in different shapes and colors, may include accelerometers, temperature sensors, or unique add-ons, but all of them have one thing in common — they transmit a signal.
What is a beacon actually transmitting?
It’s not throwing just any old message into the air. It’s transmitting a unique ID number that tells a listening device which beacon it’s next to.
Really, it’s just a code name.
How can I interact with beacons?
For example, when a shopping mall installs beacon in their shop, all of the beacons will have certain IDs, registered in their dedicated app. This means a smartphone app can immediately recognize that the incoming ID is important and that it’s from that particular mall. The ID, however, has little meaning on its own; it’s entirely up to an app or other program to recognize what it means.
What happens next? That depends on what the owner has programmed it to do. One code could trigger the app to send a coupon. Another could offer navigation services. The possibilities are nearly endless. All the beacon has to do is connect your exact location to the app, and the rest is up to the program.
Beacons are already being used for:
- Tracking: One of the beacons more practical use cases is something many of us would never have guessed. In manufacturing and transport, managers need to know exactly where goods are at any given time. By attaching beacons, they can always have that information. In fact, they can even see the information from previous days or weeks.
- Navigation: Creating accurate “GPS for indoor navigation” is a popular beacon use case. What Google Maps does for the outdoors, beacons can do for the indoors. They can tell you where you are and where you’re going in a museum, festival, or train station.
- Interaction: Beacons can make reactions automated and trigger events. When you enter a room, the projector starts. It sends notifications or acts as a loyalty card. If you make a purchase at your local cafe, beacons help the app register that you were there. On your tenth entry, you get a free latte — awesome!
- Security: Whether it’s making sure patients don’t go in the wrong wing or alerting factory workers to dangerous changes, beacons can automatically send notifications (either to app users or property owners) about a safety issue. Beacons can also be paired with geofencing to add an extra layer to data security.
- Analysis: Data is one of the biggest tools at a company’s disposal. Beacons help generate data on where customers are going or where common problems occur on an assembly line. The online platform can store information on which beacons are being triggered and how users are interacting with them.
So, this is the Beacons which are saved and published via notification to you when you get on the proximity of a beacon.
Hope this helps you kick start learning and R&D about the Beacons with this introduction. If you want to learn more about beacons, then you can check reference sources.
Thank You :)
Reference Sources:
