I've been looking for some time to explore iBeacons a bit more but couldn't quite find any that seemed to fit what I was looking for. I've seen some mention of receivers/RPis, but this seems a bit much for what I wanted.
I recently stumbled across some Chinese iBeacons that seem promising. What drew my interest is they have a Wifi Reciever that transmits via MQTT (which i'm using for some other devices).
http://aprbrother.com/en/product.htm
They seem to have some decent beacon options for decent prices.
So far I've only been playing with the USB ones (have some 202 modules also, but need to wait for batteries). I threw together a quick script that uses a device from the MQTT plugin and just parses the result, i'm going to work up a basic plugin to make it a bit more advanced.
I'm not quite sure what the best way to create/group devices is though. At first i was going to create a separate device for battery/etc, but since each receiver could detect the same beacon that didn't make much sense either. For now I've grouped by receiver (the idea would be you could put a bunch of these Wifi receivers easily in different locations), but this still makes it difficult to use. I've got to figure out a way to average the readings a bit better too (as they fluctuate a bit).
Anyway, just thought i'd post and see if anyone has any interest/ideas. I'm not a programmer so whatever I come up with i'll post (including the source).
For anyone who's in to micrcontrollers the wifi receiver itself seems very hackable, its a CC3200 module talking via serial to a bluetooth module. I'm also exploring this a bit more, they mentioned on their forum they're working on web based firmware updates which would make that a lot easier.
I recently stumbled across some Chinese iBeacons that seem promising. What drew my interest is they have a Wifi Reciever that transmits via MQTT (which i'm using for some other devices).
http://aprbrother.com/en/product.htm
They seem to have some decent beacon options for decent prices.
So far I've only been playing with the USB ones (have some 202 modules also, but need to wait for batteries). I threw together a quick script that uses a device from the MQTT plugin and just parses the result, i'm going to work up a basic plugin to make it a bit more advanced.
I'm not quite sure what the best way to create/group devices is though. At first i was going to create a separate device for battery/etc, but since each receiver could detect the same beacon that didn't make much sense either. For now I've grouped by receiver (the idea would be you could put a bunch of these Wifi receivers easily in different locations), but this still makes it difficult to use. I've got to figure out a way to average the readings a bit better too (as they fluctuate a bit).
Anyway, just thought i'd post and see if anyone has any interest/ideas. I'm not a programmer so whatever I come up with i'll post (including the source).
For anyone who's in to micrcontrollers the wifi receiver itself seems very hackable, its a CC3200 module talking via serial to a bluetooth module. I'm also exploring this a bit more, they mentioned on their forum they're working on web based firmware updates which would make that a lot easier.
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