Ipkee Au asked 3 months ago
Hi There,
Just wonder if anyone has developed ibeacon using ESP32 before? Any advise will be greatly appreciated.
What I am tring to do is to have ibeacon next to my speaker pairs, so that music can be forwarded to different speaker pair based on my position.
Best regards,
IKA
Rui Santos Staff answered 3 months ago
Hi.
Unfortunately, at the moment we don’t have any tutorials to set the ESP32 as an ibeacon.
We’ll search about that in the future as it seems a topic that several people are interested in.
Regards,
Rui
RandomNerdTutorials_Newsletters answered 1 month ago
Helko IKA,
I have played around with both iBeacon (Apple) and EddyStone (Google) beacons.
Wheb i ran the iBeacon demo example code in Arduino, I had my ESP32-S3 based board being recognized by Home Assistant along with distance to beacon information!
My issue was that the iBeacon standard’s data support was too limited for my sensor application (not enough payload data space for my all sensors data!), so I played with the EddyStone stuff (it supports multiple beacon payload formats) and got my beacon working with my various measured sensor data being provided as desired.
The “problems” I ran into are:
1) Although EddyStone was being promulgated as a standard by Google in Android, it has now been deprecated. The reason is one of the EddyStone beacon formats was the one that freaked consumers out a few years ago because it was able to pop-up unsolicited messages on Android devices (used in retail environments) and people got really upset and Google removed all beacon support and just released the EddyStone stuff as open source. So, now no platform really supports it.
2). Eventhough I got the EddyStone stuff running using the Arduino environment, it had reliability issues. I’d do long-term testing and the code would randomly freeze…
In an intersting twist, I gave up on the Arduino environment based beacon stuff and went to MicroPython running on the ESP32. I have gotten more bluetooth “beaconing” functionality running with MicroPython and it was done in a shorter amount of time! Also, the beacon code seems to be much more robust than the Arduino stuff…
I am now doing longterm running of the code to get an idea of the true robustness of things because I am working on a non-critical medical’ish sensor device that needs to be a simple beaconing/advertising device that then supports BLE data connectivity and updates.
By the way, I have used the Chrome browser’s WEB-Bluetooh support to create really neat browser based data viewing of my sensor data using Javascript!
Good Luck!
Sara Santos Staff answered 1 month ago
Hi.
That’s great.
Are you using a specific library for Bluetooth in MicroPython to create the beacons?
Regards,
Sara