In the application I am looking forward Bluetooth in Beacon is very good option as I want to collect PH from different sources to the application so I can't pair my android device with all the BLE devices at a time as it will be around 20-30.
But I can see that if there is Beacon then Android can scan all of them and also get the RSSI of all devices without being paired with them.
So is it possible that we add few other parameter for example PH, Temperature, Humidity and 3-4 other parameters so Beacon is going to broadcast all these parameter along with RSSI and in Android app I can collect all the information?
I am not sure if this is feasible solution or not and if it is then how to achieve this in beacon?
Bluetooth beacons generally rely upon advertisement packets to send data, which are limited in the number of bytes available. For manufacturer advertisements, you basically have 24 usable bytes to work with, although you need to reserve some of these as a flag to indicate it is your beacon format, and not somebody else's beacon format.
You can look at the AltBeacon spec as an example. This format uses two bytes to identify itself (the "beacon code"), 20 bytes of beacon identifiers, one byte of data and one byte for reference RSSI. You probably still want a unique identifier for each beacon so you know which beacon sent you the information. But you might be able to cut this down to four bytes for your purposes, which would allow you to have 2^32 different beacons sending this information.
The Android Beacon Library lets you both transmit and receive beacons using arbitrary formats you can define using the BeaconParser class. A beacon format that uses a four byte identifier, two bytes each for PH, Temperature and Humidity data fields, and two bytes each for five other data fields might look like this:
m:2-3=abcd,i:4-7,d:8-9,d:10-11,d:12-13,d:14-15,d:16-17,d:18-19,d:20-21,d:22-23,p:24-24
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I wrote an app to detect beacons and calculate the distance by RSSI.
When I use iPhone/android for simulating as beacons will cause a big difference on RSSI.
Such as I put iPhone at 3M far from BLEscanner the RSSI is -65. But at the same place, the RSSI of the android devices will be -80 or more.
Does anyone know how to adjust the difference of RSSI?
As you have discovered, every phone model has a slightly different Bluetooth transmission power. Similarly, every phone model has a slightly different receiver sensitivity. Changing which phone model is used for transmission and reception will affect the RSSI you receive.
You cannot perfectly correct for these differences for two main reasons:
There are lots of other factors that come in to play that affect RSSI that have nothing do do with the phone model (signal reflections, attenuation by the air or obstructions, the effect of a phone case, a nearby hand holding the phone or other human body parts.)
There are limited data on the differences between phones in terms of Bluetooth transmitter power and receiver sensitivity.
With those caveats in mind, Google did create a limited dataset of correction factors as part of its coronavirus contact tracing effort with Apple.
You can read how this works here
And see the full correction data set here
The basic idea is:
Take two values from the CSV data set above for your test setup:
Use "tx" column value for the transmitting phone model as its "TX_Power" in the equation below. Use "RSSI_correction" column value for the receiving phone.
Then plug them into this equation:
Attenuation = TX_power - (RSSI_measured + RSSI_correction)
The resulting Attenuation value is the corrected signal loss (measured in dB and usable similar to RSSI) between your transmitter and receiver and can be used as an input to distance formulas.
I've seen a lot of discussions on battery for altbeacon, specially if beacons are inside a region for a long time. This post was actually very clarifying.
I am currently working in a solution that requires a good sensibility (which I define as being a small detection time for a new beacon in a region).
As some beacons may be anonymous (which I define as presenting unexpected MAC addresses but share a same matching byte sequence) to the scanner in this particular solution, I would like to achieve good sensibility to new beacons but also a balanced battery impact to the user.
What concerns me is if a first beacon is found and the region triggers based on the matching sequence, how could I get a notification once another beacon approaches (or leaves) ?
A guess I was going to try was to keep monitoring for a generic matching sequence and once a beacon is found for that general sequence, range it to get its address and them create a particular region for the mac I've taken. The only problem with this approach was how could I prevent the first beacon to keep triggering the generic region?
And just out of curiosity. Is the ScanFilter class related to those hardware filters introduced on android 5?
Thank you,
If you need to quickly find new beacons with the same byte patterns as ones that already exist in the vicinity, you really have no choice but to keep ranging.
In such a situation, there is no distinction between ranging and monitoring in terms of battery consumption. Both will require constant Bluetooth scans and decoding of all beacons in the vicinity. Scan filters (yes, the hardware filters introduced in Android 5,) will not help because you expect the byte patterns to be the same. There is no such thing as a packet "does not match" scan filter that could be used to find only new MAC addresses.
You may need to accept the battery drain of constant scans and just try to limit how long they last, if your use case allows. Short scans of 30 minutes or less might be acceptable.
You could possibly save some battery by writing your own BLE scanning parsing code tailored to this use case. You could first look for unique MAC addresses, and only do further processing and parsing if the MAC address has never been seen before. This will not reduce battery usage from the constant scan, but it would cut down on battery usage from CPU expended on parsing packets. This might save 10-30% depending on the number of beacons in the vicinity.
Bottom line: you are right to be concerned about battery usage with this use case.
I'm attempting to transmit as a beacon an Android phone using the altbeacon library as described here. I am trying to set some parameters using the following methods:
setServiceUuid(0xfeaa)
setBluetoothAddress("31:14:15:92:65:35")
setBluetoothName("MyBeacon")
When the beacon is interpreted on another Android device in the RangeNotifier listener method, didRangeBeaconsInRegion, the beacon doesn't have these parameters set. (eg. getServiceUuid is -1 and the BT address and name are each null).
I'm using the following beacon layout in the parser for the transmitting application and in the scanning application:
m:2-3=beac,i:4-19,i:20-21,i:22-23,p:24-24,d:25-25
I don't know what this means though; I wonder if I need to change it.
Anyone have an idea how to make the bluetooth address, name etc. be accessible in the beacon that is scanned on the receiving device?
Some fields in the Beacon class are only used when detecting beacons and do not affect transmissions. You have found three of these exact fields. Here is an explanation of each and why they work this way:
BluetoothAddress: this is a fixed six byte unique address built into the Bluetooth chip on your phone. When sending packets (beacon advertisements or otherwise), the chip always uses the same address. You cannot change it. This is by just the way Bluetooth works.
BluetoothName: this is the friendly name of your phone visible to other Bluetooth scanners. Changing this name affects not just beacon transmissions but all Bluetooth operations on the phone. For this reason, the library's BeaconTransmitter does not change this name. You can do so youself, however, by calling the setName method on Android's BluetoothAdapter class. See here.
ServiceUUID: This field applies only to certain beacon formats such as Eddystone, which are based on 16-bit GATT Service UUIDs. For other beacon formats (AltBeacon, iBeacon), this value is -1 as you have seen. The ServiceUUID is actually defined in the BeaconParser layout expression. In the Beacon class you can read it, but writing to it has no effect. You generally do not need to worry about this field, and certainly not for the AltBeacon layout shown in the question, because it is not used for that format.
We're trying to emulate a beacon on a Android device and would like to include some 50 bytes of application data in payload? We found that with AltBeacon format this is not possible? How can it be done with help of AltBeacon lib for Android?
Moreover, what are primary and secondary beacon advertisements?
What is role of GattBeacon in this context and when and how should it be used?
There are two basic types of BLE beacon advertisements:
Manufacturer advertisements (iBeacon, AltBeacon, Gimbal)
GATT Service Advertisements (Eddystone, UriBeacon, GattBeacon)
They differ mainly by the bluetoorh PDU type, but in both cases the number of bytes that can be transmitted are similarly limited. It is 23 bytes for manufacturer advertisements (not counting the two byte manufacturer code).
With Bluetooth 4.x, you just won't get close to 50 bytes in a single packet. Bluetooth 5.0 is expected to increase this at some point in the future.
None of the beacon layouts let you go beyond this limit. GattBeacon is merely a generic example layout of a beacon based on GATT Service advertisements, and is not meant for practical use.
Recently I got a iBeacon device with the intention of creating Android Apps than can recognize it and use it. I'm new using bluetooth in Android Apps and there many things than I still don't know. Looking in the Internet and in this forum I found recommendations to use the Radius Networks' Android IBeacon Library but, alas, now it's no longer available:
https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service
So I started by using the code shown in Android Developers' guide about Bluetooth Low Energy:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/bluetooth-le.html
Using this code I can detect the device, even connect to it, but I don't know how to get the Proximity Uuid and the Major and Minor values: the app shows a lot of Uuids from services and characteristics of the device, but none is the Proximity Uuid of the device.
Anyone could tell me how to get that data using the Android Bluetooth LE API, or help me to get the Radius Networks' Android iBeacon library for Eclipse and a guide to use it or sample showing how to use it?
Thank you.
EDIT/UPDATE:
It gets better.. AltBeacon !
Check the AltBeacon specifications
AltBeacon brings greater transparency to what a beacon transmits and
how that data can be used by Android, Windows and other devices.
Why the Android iBeacon Library by RadiusNetworks is no longer available:
Vendors have started complying with guidelines set by Apple and have,
as a result, been forced to ‘scrub’ their products of any references
or connection between Android devices and their detection of iBeacon
protocols.
Read more:
Apple cracks down on iBeacon for Android
I think the best bet seems to be from somebody who has been using it, already has it, can share it with you, as from previous commits, you may not get every component - library, sample, service
Also: A note from the CEO for Android iBeacon Lib, RadiusNetworks
Now, coming to Proximity UUID and major, minors:
I have not found a direct way to get it, in terms of a parameter, though you can have a look at read major, minor, uuid of beacons in android and SensorTag using iBeacon Technology. In the latter, there is an indication of major, minor, uuid after iBeacon Service, however TI instruments might be the restriction.
In android, as an identifier.. you can recover the device addressby device.getAddress() of the beacon/for each BluetoothDevice device;.
The following two are totally different things, although both are called UUID.
UUIDs of GATT services which are hosted on a BLE peripheral device.
Proximity UUID of iBeacon.
What you should know about "UUIDs of GATT services":
BLE peripheral devices may implement a GATT server.
A GATT server hosts GATT services.
What the API "android.bluetooth.BluetoothGatt.getServices()" returns is a list of GATT services (List<BluetoothGattService>).
BluetoothGattService.getUuid() returns the ID of the service.
What you should know about "Proximity UUID of iBeacon":
BLE peripheral devices broadcast advertising packets.
The payload part of an advertising packet contains a list of AD structures.
An AD structure consists of (1) Length (1 byte), (2) AD Type (1 byte) and (3) AD Data. The AD structure format is described in "11 ADVERTISING AND SCAN RESPONSE DATA FORMAT" of "Bluetooth Core Specification 4.2".
iBeacon is a kind of AD structures.
AD Type of iBeacon is 0xFF (which means Manufacturer Specific Data).
The first 4 bytes of AD Data of iBeacon are 0x4C, 0x00, 0x02 and 0x15. The first 2 bytes (0x4C, 0x00) mean "Apple, Inc." and the next 2 bytes (0x02, 0x15) mean "iBeacon format".
Proximity UUID (16 bytes), major number (2 bytes in big endian), minor number (2 bytes in big endian), and power (1 byte) follow the first 4 bytes.
So, what you have to do to get iBeacon information (Proximity UUID, major, minor, power) are as follows.
Parse a payload of an advertising packets as a list of AD structures.
For each AD structure, check if AD Type is 0xFF and the first 4 bytes of AD Data are 0x4C, 0x00, 0x02 and 0x15.
When the conditions of 2. are satisfied, parse the remaining bytes as Proximity UUID, major number, minor number, and power.
If you use nv-bluetooth, you can extract iBeacon from an advertising packet like the following:
public void onLeScan(BluetoothDevice device, int rssi, byte[] scanRecord)
{
// Parse the payload of the advertising packet.
List<ADStructure> structures =
ADPayloadParser.getInstance().parse(scanRecord);
// For each AD structure contained in the advertising packet.
for (ADStructure structure : structures)
{
if (structure instanceof IBeacon)
{
// iBeacon was found.
IBeacon iBeacon = (IBeacon)structure;
// Proximity UUID, major number, minor number and power.
UUID uuid = iBeacon.getUUID();
int major = iBeacon.getMajor();
int minor = iBeacon.getMinor();
int power = iBeacon.getPower();
........
See "iBeacon as a kind of AD structures" for details.
RadiusNetworks has "re-released" the libraries and examples in conjunction with a new cross platform beacon proximity spec.
New AltBeacon Standard Allows Cross-Platform Proximity Apps
Check out altbeacon.org.