I want to know which Beacon Signal Receiver would be best if I want to use. There are many receivers available in market so I am afraid which would be better. I want Receiver that scan beacons get their data and send back it to server! Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Your smartphone is the ultimate receiver (:
If you’re looking for something else, you can try a Raspberry Pi with a Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongle, as it’s relatively easy to write apps for that—e.g., there’s a ready-made Node.js library which you can use:
Not sure which dongle would be best though, I haven’t tested too many of them.
What’s your use case? Are you looking for any specific size/shape? Which language do you want to program the receiver/app in?
I want to make a employee tracking system for large companies in size. There would be beacons with all employee and the receivers would be installed. Then the receivers should send the signal/data (motion,location) from various beacons to the server. Then the employeer or the Recognised person can know the location of any employee in his company, his movement etc. in his admin app.
I want to initially develop it for Android.
Thanks!
Sounds cool!
I guess you can just mount an Android device near the entrance, and use that as your receiver. As to which Android device—generally, the newer the better, as they have better Bluetooth chips that are more responsive. Nexus 6 for example is known to behave very well in terms of Bluetooth scanning.
I wonder the Android Mobile Cannot do all the things that receiver will do. Also the real time functionality of the Receiver will be much better than the device.
Hmm, where did you get this feeling? If you have an Android device with good Bluetooth, it can do all any other Bluetooth receiver with good Bluetooth can do.
But speaking of non-smartphone receivers, I was testing Intel Edison this weekend, and it worked really well—I wrote a simple Node.js app that was detecting beacons and relaying the scan data over WiFi to an external server. And it costs something around $60 I think, so less than good Android devices.
Thank You @heypiotr. So what I want can this receiver do. Means every worker would have beacons and the receiver would receive and transmit the data. So i can scan every beacons?
Any limitation you have faced using that?
You can scan for any Bluetooth Low Energy devices, including any beacons. There are ready-made 3rd party SDKs for parsing iBeacon and Estimote’s Nearable packets, like the Node.js SDK I mentioned earlier.
