Develop Reference

Can an Android device act as an iBeacon, with Flag?

I want to transmit iBeacon data packet from android phone, with data flag.
Data Flag (0x01) is Bluetooth GAP specification that represents beacon's capability.
My situation:
Currently, I'm trying to advertise using BluetoothLeAdvertiser. But it doesn't works as I thought. I found that, I can only advertise "Manufacturer specific data".
BluetoothManager manager = (BluetoothManager) getSystemService(BLUETOOTH_SERVICE);
mBluetoothAdapter = manager.getAdapter();
mBluetoothLeAdvertiser = mBluetoothAdapter.getBluetoothLeAdvertiser();
// Settings here
mBluetoothLeAdvertiser.startAdvertising(settings, getAdvertiseData(), mAdvertiseCallback);
My current result:
What I want:
Common iBeacon data packet(Image below) has data flag, Type 0x01. And I want to add this flag to my iBeacon advertise packet.
That means, I want add Raw data "0x020106" to head part of the packet.
How can I archive this?
Etc:
I have already read about question below, but it doesn't help for my problem.
Can an Android device act as an iBeacon?
Also, I already have read that android ble api doesn't support Data flag.
But the comment was in 2015, is there any hopeful changes now?
https://github.com/AltBeacon/android-beacon-library/issues/141
Unfortunately, this is not currently allowed by the Android BLE APIs, so the library cannot this.
Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

Unfortunately, Android's Java BLE APIs expose no way of doing this. I researched this topic to answer the Android Beacon Library Issue you referenced. The Java APIs only let you advertise either service data or manufacturer data. They are simply not flexible enough to let you specify any other advertising PDUs. This has not changed as of May 2016.
You might be able to do what you want by dropping down to a lower level and talking to C BlueDroid APIs. But doing this would require a rooted device and perhaps installing a custom Android OS image to give you access.

Detect beacon without hardcode

I was wondering :
When we enter a shop, using the app shop, we receive for example a notification.
But what if the beacon is down, and it's replaced with another beacon, with a different UUID etc .. ? Are the UUID/Major/Minor value of a beacon not harcoded but in a database on the server ? How it's fetched ?
Thanks you

The UUID of an iBeacon is not related in any way to its MAC address. It is a value that is assigned to the beacon by the beacon owner. Some beacon vendors have a specific UUID or range of UUIDs while others allow any UUID to be used.
If a particular beacon failed then the replacement would likely be configured with the same UUID.
When the app detects a particular beacon it needs to refer to some database, either in the app or on a server, that gives "meaning" to the particular UUID/major/minor combination so it is possible that the database could be updated to reflect the new hardware but this is less likely than simply configuring the replacement hardware with the same values

It is a good practice to not hard code your beacon identifiers in your app. You can build your app so on launch, it contacts a web service to download a list of identifiers to search for. You can build your own or use an off the shelf service like my company's ProximityKit that does exactly this.
Of course, if you are relying on beacon detections to launch your app, your app won't get auto launched to download the new beacon identifiers if the beacon ids change in advance. The user will have to manually do the launch to get the new list.
There are a few ways around this:
Set the identifiers on replaced beacons so they are the same as the old ones.
If you know you cannot set the identifiers, broaden the beacon region filter for auto launch so it matches a wide variety of beacon identifiers. On iOS you can search for all beacons with a shared UUID. On Android, you can search for all beacons regardless of identifiers.

When you initialise Beacon Region then you need to identify at least UUID and it is either hardcoded with in the app or can be placed on the server and should be retrieved from server before calling initialising Beacon Region.
NOTE:You should have a copy of all beacons UUIDs,majors and minors for future purposes
But suppose your Beacon goes out of order then there's a backup plan.
Follow below said steps:
1.Install Estimote-iOS or android app
2.Place the new beacon near to your device and start ranging beacons in estimote app.
3.Then you need to login with your cloud account in your app and configure new beacon(i.e edit your beacon's UUID.)You can even edit major,minor etc
4.Save those settings and your new beacon is configured and ready to use.
Happy Coding :)

CoreBluetooth: the UUID of a peripheral is an inherent attribute of a device?

I use CoreBluetooth to connect my iPhone with a device equipped with Bluetooth 4.0.
I print its (as a peripheral) UUID :
<CBPeripheral: 0x1742fca80, identifier = B148AD69-1FC7-498C-016F-33BA3BE041A3, name = HMSoft, state = disconnected>
I wonder whether this identifier is an inherent attribute of a device.
Since I use the following code in android to get its UUID which is different from what I get using CoreBluetooth in iPhone:
BluetoothDevice device = intent.getParcelableExtra(BluetoothDevice.EXTRA_DEVICE);
for (ParcelUuid uuid : device.getUuids()) {
Log.d("UUID", uuid.getUuid().toString());
}
( I connect with the same device but the print UUID is different).

Identifier in CBPeripheral is a randomly generated Unique identifier. This gets varied over time. In case of a CBPeripheral, we need to know about two kinds of UUIDs. One is ServiceUUID and other is CharacteristicUUID. Each peripheral broadcast data over each service. A single service can have more than one characteristics. For eg. a device information service can have device name, device version etc as its characteristics.
See the following image for a better understanding CBPeripheral. The Apple docs speaks well on this.

My first answer, so I hope I won't make a fool of myself ;-)
BluetoothDevice.getUuids():
Returns the supported features (UUIDs) of the remote device. I.e. UUIDs of services advertised by the device, not UUID of the device itself.
I'm currently looking myself for an Android way to get the UUID of a discovered BLE device...

Use Find Me Profile in Android 4.3

I a trying to understand and modify the BLE sample von Android.com, now I can discover my sample BLE Device (HTC Fetch) and now I want to understand all that GATT and BLE stuff.
What are Characteristics and what are Profile and what are Serivces and what do they mean in the Bluetooth Low Energy World? I used HTC Dev and found a Service and a Characteristics UUID.
https://www.htcdev.com/devcenter/opensense-sdk/bluetooth-smart/htc-fetch/
But I guess what I need is the Find Me Profile, cause for the first steps I only want to get the Find Me react to a Button click.
https://developer.bluetooth.org/gatt/profiles/Pages/ProfileViewer.aspx?u=org.bluetooth.profile.find_me.xml
How to implement this in my App?
When I understand everything I try Power and Proximity (reading RSSI and compare with defined range).
Can some one help me understanding Bluetooth LE?

Here's a related post
How to use the profile of PROXIMITY PROFILE,IMMEDIATE ALERT SERVICE and Find Me Profile in android 4.3 BLE?
Basically you can approximate a proximity level using tx+power - rssi or distance roughly with
d = (rssi-A)/-20 (where A = rssi at one meter) or simply use rssi mapping out ranges to display You could also initially base it on just the connection range and skip rssi.
As for the FindMe, simply write the low or high alert values to make it sound when you press a button in your app. For pressing a button on the device use the UUIDs shown in the documentation.
sample code for that device is forthcoming

Discovering vendor-specific bluetooth devices only

Need to discover or search for Bluetooth devices of certain "vendor-specific" devices.
"vendor-specific" means all devices will have similar starting bits in their "MAC" address
For example, I want to search only for devices whose MAC address starts with 12:34:56:
It should search only for specific series of MAC addresses and list them.

Perform a full discovery, then filter using BluetoothDevice.getAddress()
// Define Vendor ID Prefix
public static final String VENDOR_ID = "12:34:56:"
// First, do a full discovery...
BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter().startDiscovery()
//...
// Then, for each device returned from discovery...
if ( device.getAddress().startsWith(VENDOR_ID) ) {
// Do Something
}

My Explanation will be based on the BluetoothChat example from the Android SDK, hopefully this is ok, otherwise I would need to write a lot more. If you haven't seen the BluetoothChat example, go take a look, it's really nice!
If you want to use a device where you don't know the complete adress, you'll have to do a complete discovery with BluetoothAdapter.startDiscovery() and search the received addresses for the ones you want to.
If you know the complete address of the device you want to connect to you can directly connect to this device with BluetoothDevice device = mBluetoothAdapter.getRemoteDevice(address)