Can estimote beacons be used to communicate to another BLE module + controller without requiring an android or iOS app? I want to know if I can use it in my embedded project to find region.
Beacons are just regular Bluetooth 4.0 devices that broadcast a set advertising packet in regular intervals. Any device that can scan for Bluetooth 4.0 advertisements will be able to detect your beacons. For example, Raspberry Pi with a Bluetooth 4.0 dongle, or Intel Edison, or Arduino with a BLE shield, etc.
There are even some ready-made 3rd-party SDKs in Python or Node.js which you can use, instead of having to do Bluetooth discovery and packet parsing yourself.
Can beacons broadcast its packet to more than one BLE modules in the range?
And on the other hand can BLE module receive packets from multiple beacons if available in range?
Will it toggle between multiple beacons or will it show all the beacons available in the range?
Beacons broadcast their packets “into the air,” which means that:
- every BLE module in range can pick them up,
- a BLE module in range can pick up all the packets from multiple beacons.
Feel free to take a look at our Getting Started materials, for a high-level overview and better undestanding of how beacon technology works:
And naturally, if you have any questions not covered by these, we’ll be happy to help here (:
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you said every BLE module can pick up beacons, but will it be able to receive the distance from all beacons as well in the case of ranging?
Yup. That’s because you don’t really “receive the distance from beacons.” Instead, you need to take the signal strength with which the advertising packet was received, and based on that estimate the distance.
In this link https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/200848266-Estimote-Beacons-Stickers-requirements-and-compatible-devices it said that it either needs apple’s core location, google’s proximity API or estimote SDK to interpret beacon signals. I want to work with cc2540 BLE module. What is the solution?
Our beacons broadcast regular Bluetooth 4.0 packets, so any device capable of Bluetooth 4.0 scanning can detect them.
The article you point to says:
If you want non-iOS/Android devices and tools to work with beacons (for example you want to use PhoneGap, or build an app for Raspberry Pi), you might need to create these tools yourself.
So yeah, you’ll likely need to code the beacon detection and parsing yourself. I’m not aware of any ready-made beacon tools for CC2540 SoC.
Which BLE chip will you recommend that can be used for both applications as a beacon broadcast(Transmitter) and beacon detection(Receiver)
suppose i want to include a BLE in my system independent of mobile platform
is it complicated to create broadcast packets and parse them in receiving side ?