BeaconAir – Track your Pi
How It Works
As I walk around with the BeaconAir Portable Pi in a hip pack, the lights come on and off [14]. However, the iBeacons are not very reliable and vary a lot, even while sitting in one spot, as indicated by a little red pin bouncing around on the control panel. A lot could be done to smooth this out with a little signal processing – at the cost of response time.
Conclusion
The BeaconAir project has been a great experience for learning about iBeacons, Bluetooth 4.0, and Philips Hue lights. It was very satisfying to figure out a reliable way to read iBeacons and determine a physical position with a Raspberry Pi.
One idea for another project revolving around iBeacons reverses the system, wherein I carry an iBeacon and build a mesh network of Raspberry Pis, all listening to the iBeacon via my BLE scanner program. The program would then communicate the RSSI information to a central Pi that figures out the location of the iBeacon and reports it to the control panel.
Granted, this approach is no cheaper than buying a bunch of iBeacons and one Pi, but it would have some really interesting data flows, and the response time could be excellent. For the fashion conscious, the wanderer would just have to carry a small iBeacon in a pocket instead of strapping on the hip pack with the Raspberry Pi. And, yes, I have also figured out that if I hang an iBeacon on the collar of Panther the cat, it can be used to trigger the MouseAir to fire a mouse, which is a much cheaper solution than an elaborate RFID cat chip tag reader [15]. The poor, much maligned cat will need to have a collar now.
Infos
- iBeacon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon
- BLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy
- Estimote: http://estimote.com
- KS Technologies Particle: https://kstechnologies.com/particle/
- BTL/BLExplorer: https://kstechnologies.com/apps/blexplorer/
- Code on GitHub: https://github.com/switchdoclabs/iBeacon-Scanner-
- BlueZ: http://www.bluez.org
- Philips Hue: http://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-li/hue-personal-wireless-lighting
- ZigBee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee
- Studio Imaginaire: http://studioimaginaire.com/en
- phue: https://github.com/studioimaginaire/phue
- RasPiConnect: http://www.milocreek.com/
- Configuration file: https://github.com/switchdoclabs
- BeaconAir in action: http://www.switchdoc.com/
- "Cat Toy Launcher" by John Shovic, Raspberry Pi Geek, issue 05, pg. 38, http://www.raspberry-pi-geek.com/Archive/2014/05/MouseAir-launches-toy-mice-for-the-amusement-of-cats
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Raspberry Pi Geek
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Related content
-
Pi in the Palace
Welcome to the sixth issue of Raspberry Pi Geek magazine. In case you haven't done the math, six issues for a bimonthly magazine means we're celebrating our one year anniversary! We had a great year, and so did the amazing Raspberry Pi computer. It seems like we were just writing about the 2 millionth Raspberry Pi, and now the Foundation has announced the 3 millionth unit.
-
Connecting a weather station to your Arduino
After losing one weather station to tropical winds, the author reboots and designs a PCB that connects to an Arduino and monitors weather instruments.
-
Getting BLE to behave on the Pi
BLE is a convenient choice for wireless communication where WiFi and Internet connectivity aren't available, but getting it to work on a Raspberry Pi can be a minefield of compatibility problems. We look at the main concepts and debugging tools you will need to get the most out of BLE on your Pi.
-
WiFi and the Raspberry Pi
This SwitchDoc column looks at various uses for the inexpensive ESP8266 WiFi/processor combination.
-
The Switch Doc rebuilds his cat toy launcher with 3D printing
To explore the possibilities of 3D printing, we rebuild the cat toy launcher that debuted in Issue 5.
