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iBeacons cheat sheet

  • The human body itself is an excellent attenuator of Bluetooth signals. Simply having your back to a beacon (i.e. where your body is positioned between the device and the beacon) will affect the signal strength and thereby lower the accuracy.

  • Similar to the existing geofence region monitoring, an application can request notifications when a device enters or leaves a region defined by a beacon. When an application makes this request to begin monitoring a beacon region it must specify the UUID of the iBeacon advertisement. While an app is limited to 20 regions being monitored, by using a single UUID in multiple locations, a device can easily monitor many physical locations simultaneously.

  • In addition to the UUID, an application can optionally supply the major and minor fields to further specify a beacon region to be monitored.

  • As with the existing region monitoring, when the user enters or exits the beacon region, the application will be notified. If the application is not currently running (for example, if it was terminated due to memory pressure on the device), then the application is launched in the background and the notification delivered. One important consideration is in iOS 7 if the user explicitly disallows Background App Refresh (either globally or specifically for your app) then your app will no longer receive region monitoring notifications. It can continue to use the ranging APIs, however.

  • iOS 7 introduces a new set of APIs for determining the approximate proximity to a device using iBeacon technology, a process known as “ranging”

  • Passbook passes can take advantage of devices with iBeacon technology as well. By including the UUID of beacon, a Passbook pass can be made relevant when it is in the beacon’s region. This works the same way specifying latitude and longitude values in the locations array of your pass. You can specify the UUID and, optionally, the major and minor values as an array in the beacons key for your pass.

  • To provide the best user experience, it is critical to perform calibration in your deployment environment. As each beacon is installed you should perform a calibration step. Core Location uses an estimation model that requires calibration at a distance of 1 meter away from the beacon.

  • Ranging API are not expected to be used in the background. For best results, ranging should be used when your app is frontmost and the user is interacting with your app.

  • Due to the issues around signal strength and the variabilities in deployment environments, iBeacon technology is not intended to be used for specific location identification. It should be capable of providing room-level accuracy, but there are many factors that need to be considered to build a successful deployment.

  • For an iOS device to issue iBeacon advertisements , the app requesting this functionality must be frontmost, with the screen turned on and the device unlocked.

  • Turning an iOS Device into an iBeacon

    1. Obtain or generate a 128-bit UUID for your device.

    2. Create a CLBeaconRegion object containing the UUID value along with appropriate major and minor values for your beacon.

    3. Advertise the beacon information using the Core Bluetooth framework.

References

Getting Started with iBeacon

Turning an iOS Device into an iBeacon