Has anyone developed a BLE gateway for getting the beacon data to the web versus using a phone? What did you use for the gateway hardware and software? What was the hardest part? Interested in learning from your experience!
Update: We’re building software to do this out-of-the box with your hardware of choice https://www.upbyte.dev/
A few personal recommendations, ranked subjectively from easiest to harder:
Estimote LTE Beacon, programmable in JavaScript, Internet connectivity via LTE-M, built-in battery (just note that continuous Bluetooth scanning depletes the battery quickly), rechargable via USB-C (note: LTE Beacon doesn’t support connecting directly to your own servers, all communication goes through Estimote Cloud)
Rasp Pi, there are quite some Bluetooth scanning libraries available (e.g., “noble” for Node.js, “PyBluez” for Python, etc.), Internet connectivity via WiFi or Ethernet, could power it from a battery pack (power bank), but it’s not really optimized for battery power
some Arduino board with Bluetooth (built-in, or more commonly via an addon/shield) and Internet connectivity (there are boards with Ethernet, WiFi, 3G, LTE, LTE-M, etc.), programmable in C/Arduino IDE, many boards support LiPo batteries
probably requires some minimal knowledge/experience of the world of microcontrollers … or at least some willingness and time to learn, there’s a ton of great learning resources out there (:
Special note about maybe using a cheap Android device as a gateway, but you’ve probably already thought about that since you mentioned you’re looking for alternatives to a phone.
This is a great list and thank you for the response. I did grab a few LTE Beacons, so I will try this out. We actually started with the RPI approach with an application we were building using estimote beacons, which were a perfect fit.
From that experience, and what we built, we’re now putting together an out-of-the-box solution (because we couldn’t find anything). Here is the website for early BETA: https://www.upbyte.dev/