Beaconing

Overview

In the early days, when our Mesh Nodes were still called SmartBeacons, we were one of the first companies to provide a platform for managing and monitoring a huge number of beacons. We have kept these possibilities but nowadays, this is only a small subset of what our platform can do. It allows you to remotely configure beaconing messages such as iBeacon, EddyStone or our custom BlueRange Tag message.

Only BlueRange Mesh Nodes (most of them) support this features and you cannot assign beaconing messages to BlueRange Tags as they are usually running with small batteries.

Configuration

You can add beaconing messages from the Configuration page of a Mesh Node.

beaconing no adv message

Once you chose to add a beaconing message, you will be prompted for the kind of message that you want to assign. Continue to read below depending on the message type you want to use.

We are currently only supporting a single beacon message per mesh node, so make sure to not select a mesh node that already has a message configured, otherwise you need to remove that message first before being able to assign a new one.

You are able to see the currently configured Beaconing Messages if you open one of your mesh nodes and go to the Configuration page.

beaconing ibeacon message applied

You can always check the status of the message if you go to the Actions page. For each change of the advertising message, an Update Advertising Message action will be created. Once this has been marked as complete, the device has successfully accepted the beaconing message and is now broadcasting it.

beaconing apply action

iBeacon Messages

The iBeacon format consists of a 128 bit UUID, a 2 byte identifier called major and another 2 byte identifier called minor. As the UUID is a really long number with 5 undecillion possible values, it is almost impossible to randomly pick a number that has been used by somebody else on earth. It is therefore possible to randomly generate it with the (almost) guarantee that it is unique. When putting iBeacons in multiple buildings, one option is to use the major identifier to specify the building and the minor identifier to have a unique id for each beacon in that building.

With BlueRange you can either specify these values yourself or you can choose to use the platform generated values for either your organization or your network. If you decide to leave the major and minor empty, these will also be automatically assigned based on the UUID you selected.

Here are the rules for automatic generation:

  • UUID: If you do not change the default UUID, the UUID of your organization will be used.

  • Major: Each of your networks has a fixed id when you create it. This id will be used for all mesh nodes, if you leave the field empty.

  • Minor: Each of your mesh nodes has a unique node id in its network. Each mesh node will use this unique id if you do not specify another value.

After assigning the message(s) the values will be generated for all mesh nodes and will be stored. They will not change if you do not delete or change them manually.

beaconing ibeacon message settings

Eddystone UID Message

The Eddystone UID format is similar to the iBeacon format and also tries to specify a format that uniquely identifies a beacon. Similar to the iBeacon message, you can either specify all values or let the platform generate them. here are the rules:

  • UID: The UID is similar to a UUID but shorter. It is still big enough so that it is very unlikely that you would randomly pick the same UID as another person. Leave the field prefilled to use the UID generated from your organization UUID.

  • Identifier: The identifier consists of 6 bytes that you can freely assign to contain either a mesh node id, a building id, product id or a combination of these. If you leave it empty, it will be generated from the network id and node id automatically and will be unique for each mesh node.

beaconing eddystone form

Eddystone URL Message

The Eddystone URL message can be used to let one or many mesh nodes advertise and internet address. The URL is encoded in a special format to make it as short as possible. You can of course also use an URL shortener and use the shortened URL in the beaconing message.

  • URL: Enter the URL of the page that you want to advertise, this is used for all selected mesh nodes.

beaconing eddystone url form

BlueRange Tag Messages

BlueRange Tag messages are a nifty feature to create smartphone applications that do not need internet access while still being able to reconfigure the type of products advertised by a mesh node. The tags can be either hardcoded in the smartphone app or they can be retrieved from our REST endpoints and can be cached in the app. By being able to reconfigure the tags for all your mesh nodes, you can always remotely reconfigure everything without updating the smartphone app or relying on the internet connection of the user.

Once you decide to apply a BlueRange Tag message, you will have the ability to create and select a number of advertising tags.

beaconing bluerange tag select

Through the Add Tag button, you will be able to select all previously created advertising tags or create new ones. The tags can be used organization wide for all of your devices once you apply the BlueRange tag message.

Creating a new advertising tag requires a name and an id. This id will then be stored in the final beaconing message and can be picked up by any beacon scanning application. In this example, the beaconing message would state that there are apples and bananas nearby.

beaconing bluerange tag create

After your tag was created, you can add it to the message. Up to three tags can be selected for each Mesh Node. You can always change the tags for any of the mesh nodes and the BlueRange Tag Message will be updated accordingly.