I am looking for feedback for this idea.
This is not a serious project, just curious to see how it works, just for fun (and because our door bell is half of the time broken).
It would be to let people ring a sound in the house from outside, that sound would be produced by a Raspberry Pi for example which is connected to a server to receive the ring-the-bell-signal.
There would be two questions before I have even started that I would be happy to get advice for.
I have started on Google's 'Physical Web' page here https://google.github.io/physical-web/ and I am wondering why everybody talks about iOS/Android native App's. I thought the approach would rather be to have no native app but rather one generic one that would redirect to web pages that contain the functionality. Is this a misunderstanding from my side?
Assuming that the ring-the-bell trigger would be provided on a web page, in order to accept only ring-the-bell signals from people that are actually in front of the house I thought of using some kind of dynamic token which is encoded in the URL the beacon promotes and that token being synchronized so that the web server would be able to recognize 'current' tokens from 'old' ones. Is there a way to achieve this?
I apologize if this sounds all useless, I am just starting and look for some direction.
Regarding your question about the Physical Web: you could of course deliver it as a web app and that’s the whole point of Eddystone-URL. Keep in mind though that the users would need a web browser with Eddystone support to be able to pick up the link. Right now it’s Chrome for iOS and Opera, so there’s a limited number of people you can reach, but Google has very big expansion plans for the coming months.
As for your second question, I’m not sure why you need a token to confirm people are actually in front of the door. The beacons itself serves as the token, because only in proximity to the beacon they can receive the link. Unless you’re concerned they will later use the link to spam you with the doorbell, that makes it more complicated indeed. In that case the beacon could broadcast links from a link shortener and you could set up a system to switch the URL every 24h, or something more complex.
thanks a lot for your fast reply, you gave me everything I need!
I guess for my purpose both is sufficient. The limited support for the Eddystone URL is not a problem because there are not so many people that are interested in visiting me and also the potential spamming (that was really my concern as you have pointed out) is just a mere theoretical problem rather than a real one
However, technically it would still be interesting to know how to achieve such a rotating URL scheme…
Our SDK doesn’t offer this funcionality just yet, so to rotate the URLs you’d need to set up a shortened link and a backend tool that would hook the link up with a new link controlling the doorbell after a a given interval. Maybe someone more technical will be able to brainstorm implementations details Please share if you build it, I’d love to see how it works!
