8 ms·
PunchClock: Fun With iBeacons
- post_break 12y agoThis is really awesome. I wish I had the skill to make something like this work.
- dav- 12y agoPanic always makes such beautiful and cool things.
- jimmcslim 12y agoI'm a little surprised that there isn't broader availability of iBeacons at this stage... I feel I should be able to walk into an Apple store and buy a 10-pack of them for some reasonable price.
- tedmiston 12y agoThe Estimote beacons are the closest I've seen to this idea, but I would like to hear about more competitors. http://estimote.com/ http://estimote.com/
- clemesha 12y agoI'd say Gimbal: https://gimbal.com https://gimbal.com is a main competitor (see my comment to the parent), but I'd also be interested in hearing about others.
- clemesha 12y agoI'm currently developing an app based on Gimbal: https://gimbal.com https://gimbal.com (made by Qualcomm). My experience so far has been pretty good using their SDK (which works on iOS and Android) and their admin web interface, and the Gimbal devices themselves are not that expensive. I'd be interested to hear the experiences of others using Gimbal..
- jsemrau 12y agoGimbal beacons have the suckiest battery life. The ones that I had expired after only two months of usage. Of course you can replace the battery (big plus) but the maintenance would be costly if deployed at a customer site.
- zachdunn 12y agoFor series 10, absolutely. Their series 20 seems to have better battery life (4 AA), but they need to "approve" you in order to purchase them... still yet to see one in the wild.
- bitpew 12y agoI recently (Feb 2014) had the opportunity to evaluate different iBeacon hardware for a project. http://roximity.com http://roximity.com * "ok" price * horrible customer communication * in reality to want to sell you their services and not the iBeacons. * not configurable (proximity id, major, minor) * really long shipping time to europe (4 weeks) https://www.sticknfind.com https://www.sticknfind.com * "ok" price * nice form factor (small) * not really iBeacon compatible. They say you can flash their beacons to make them compatible, but i haven't found out how since their support is not responding. * not configurable (proximity id, major, minor) http://kontakt.io http://kontakt.io * good price * great support * major, minor configurable. proximity id not * form factor kinda bulky * they seem to be able to deliver huge amount of beacons http://www.easibeacon.com http://www.easibeacon.com * great price * great support * nice form factor (same as stickNFind) * fully configurable (proximity id, major, minor) * the company is relatively young Can't say anything about the battery life yet, but the batteries were replaceable in each case.
- jsemrau 12y agoWhy would you? Any Bluetooth 4.0 supporting spec is a potential beacon. That makes roughly 400 mil devices sold.
- maxsilver 12y agoFor what it's worth, Gelo sells beacons in exactly this manner -- you can just buy 10 beacons, and they ship the same day you order them. http://www.getgelo.com/beacons/ http://www.getgelo.com/beacons/ (Disclaimer : I work with the organization.)
- TheFuture 12y agoBecause standalone iBeacons to trigger geofences is not what I believe Apple intends to use them for. This is what Estimote is selling. Sure the geofence triggering is kinda cool, but I've yet to see a practical use of it. Seems like "interactive museum tour" is the thing everyone keeps coming back to. If this is what Apple wanted to do with iBeacons, they would be selling them for a couple bucks in Apple Stores. But iBeacons aren't a consumer device. I think much more likely to see "iBeacon ready" hardware sold by Apple and other 3rd parties. I think iBeacon protocol will become part of other devices, as a way to add proximity detection for the iPhone/apps that could interact with that device. How about a DSLR camera that I can pair with by touching my iPhone to it? Creating ad-hoc multi-peer networks between devices by being near them. Play a game on your phone on a nearby TV without connecting to same WiFi. Or wearables knowing which other wearables are nearby. This kind of natural, "magical" interaction is very Apple.
- Gmo 12y ago> How about a DSLR camera that I can pair with by touching my iPhone to it? Isn't it what NFC is for ? Except for Apple stubbornly deciding not to add it to the iPhone ?
- csexton 12y agoMy company, Radius Networks, does sell different hardware configurations as well as software to broadcast as a beacon. http://www.radiusnetworks.com/ http://www.radiusnetworks.com/ I really love the USB powered model, especially for something like PunchClock. No batteries means no dead batteries. http://store.radiusnetworks.com/products/radbeacon-usb http://store.radiusnetworks.com/products/radbeacon-usb We also released a number of open source projects that can help with projects like this. Including the ibeacon cli (if you are on a mac just `brew install ibeacon`), or if you want more than iOS check out the Android iBeacon Library (https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service). Sorry for the shameless plug!
- dav- 12y agoI just bought your MacBeacon app the other day. Works like a charm, thanks!
- personZ 12y agoCool project. I've always wondered what iBeacon offers, in most practical implementations, that latent wifi doesn't? If I wanted to do something similar on an Android device, for the purposes of conversation, I would register for the SCAN_RESULTS_AVAILABLE_ACTION event, and watch for the appearance or disappearance of SSID of APs that are interesting, and of course there are lots of utilities and tools that do exactly this (e.g. when I near home control these settings, etc). Ping a web service with updates, etc. SSIDs can of course be cloned, just as iBeacons can. Neither are truths that they are what they say they are.
- mikeash 12y agoWalled garden answer: Apple doesn't let you write an app that wakes up when a SSID becomes visible, but you can write an iOS app that wakes up and does something when an iBeacon becomes visible. Technological answer: iBeacons allow more selectivity and precision. You can be confident that a visible iBeacon is within 30ft or so, rather than 300+ft for WiFi, and with a little calibration you can measure the distance reasonably well. WiFi can tell you "the user is in [a section of] the building", while iBeacons can tell you "the user is standing in front of exhibit X".
- gress 12y agoThe walled garden answer is strictly true, but moot in this case, since you could also use region monitoring to wake up your app, and that will use SSIDs indirectly.
- personZ 12y ago>You can be confident that a visible iBeacon is within 30ft or so, rather than 300+ft for WiFi, and with a little calibration you can measure the distance reasonably well. Doesn't BLE have a range of some 150 feet+? That doesn't differ much from the range of 802.11g. Both of them have amplitude that you can measure, from which you could guess at distance (especially if you're near the same source multiple times). Of course a store isn't going to set up a bunch of APs to notify you when you're near a display, but aside from channel overlap and ugliness technically they could. And outside of the walled garden that you mentioned, it would be just as suitable for the role it filled in this application.
- NamTaf 12y agoThis would be incredible to strap on to every middle-and-above management type in my company so I could get things signed off when I actually needed to
- hayksaakian 12y agoSo is there any plan for interop with non apple devices?
- flyt 12y agoNo, because this is made by Panic, a company that only makes software for OS X and iOS.
- superuser2 12y agoIs there anything close to standardized enough for non-Apple devices to implement this sort of functionality?
- grrowl 12y agoTheoretically, there's no reason you couldn't write a similar app for Android devices which support BLE[1] to reimplement this functionality, but Panic have only ever written for Apple devices. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18906988/what-is-the-ibeacon-bluetooth-profile http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18906988/what-is-the-ibea...
- bitpew 12y agoThere is a open source iBeacon library for Android: https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service Decoding the iBeacon packets is quite easy, but you need a device that supports BLE. Currently there are only a handful of Android devices that support it.
- kator 12y agoI've done quite a bit of iBeacon stuff including emulating them with Raspberry Pi's and writing an iOS app that measures the OS behavior against iBeacons. It's pretty interesting stuff, there are a couple of my beacon's I'm using to test iOS behaviors with that are buried in a New York city park near my place. If you find one let me know. I suppose I could write some of my findings up but I've been a bit busy...
- jsilence 12y agoHm, geocaching TNG anyone?
- smallegan 12y agoI'm interested in using this for home automation purposes. Accurate information about what room of the house I am in allows for the home automation interface to be greatly simplified by only showing options to control nearby items.
- TheFuture 12y agoWouldn't it make more sense if the nearby items themselves were broadcasting iBeacons? I think this is what Apple intends to do with the protocol.
- smallegan 12y agoIt would certainly be useful but currently a lot of things don't have Bluetooth LE and are controlled via zigbee, z-wave, wifi, etc.. So knowing what room you are in is very useful in itself because it can help identify what target devices you may want to control.
- cmollis 12y agowe built an iBeacon app for a party we threw last Christmas. It was pretty cool, actually.. although Apple gave us a hassle accepting the app for whatever reason. Here's a write up.. http://objectlab.github.io http://objectlab.github.io
- andreamazz 12y agoI really like that design. We developed a similar idea a couple of weeks ago, when we received our Estimote beacons. Here you can find the blog post about it with the sources, albeit it's a simpler and rougher implementation: http://andreamazz.github.io/blog/2014/07/01/fun-with-ibeacon/ http://andreamazz.github.io/blog/2014/07/01/fun-with-ibeacon...
- bergie 12y agoWe built something similar as open source with regular Bluetooth and WiFi sensors a while back: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/smart-collaboration-space/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/smart-collaboration-space/
- abava 12y agocheck out this also http://wifichat.linkstore.ru http://wifichat.linkstore.ru
- abava 12y agoWe built similar stuff with Core Bluetooth (so, any Android phone is Ok): http://bdp.linkstore.ru http://bdp.linkstore.ru
- zachdunn 12y agoLove this. We've been working on a version of this for the office at Robin (http://getrobin.com http://getrobin.com). Biggest challenge so far has been getting interop across Android and iOS. Beacons are reliable if you have a binary "are they or aren't they here?" but a bit harder to map to smaller rooms when certain Android devices register a signal difference of 4X depending on physical orientation -- that was a fun one to figure out.
- josephpmay 12y agoJust like half of the other commenters, a team I was on built something similar at PennApps (a college hackathon) back in Februrary. It was a really fun project to work on. (http://tracktimeapp.com http://tracktimeapp.com)
- josephpmay 12y agoThe code: https://github.com/thestranger/pennapps https://github.com/thestranger/pennapps