Is it possible to search for all iBeacons which are nearby? I know it's possible to search iBeacons by UUID. But i want to find all iBeacons nearby.
An iBeacon is a region, and has as defining property the UUID. Therefore, you can only search for the ones matching a UUID.
After you find one or more with a specific UUID, you can figure out which is closest using the delegate callbacks, where the beacons are stored in an array ordered by distance.
There is great sample code on this and also a pretty detailed WWDC video session: "What's new in Core Location"
iBeacons are higher-level constructs than regular BLE peripherals. From what can be determined from the Apple docs, beacons are tied to their service UUID. i.e., a family of beacons is a "region" and a you go into and out of a region based on the range and visibility of a beacon to YOU, not the other way around. Unfortunately Apple has used the term region, which most of us probably associate with MapKit, so this is adding to the general confusion
Here's the bad news: You can only scan for ProximityUUIDs that you know, there is no "wildcard" proximityUUID. Additionally, CLBeacons don't expose the much in the way of lower level CoreBluetooth guts so if you want to find all beacons that happen to be near you, you'll have to use CoreBluetooth, scan for peripherals, then look though the returned peripheries and query each one them to find beacons. Of course Apple has neither registered (with the Bluetooth SIG) or (yet) published the iBeacon characteristics so, you'll need a BT sniffer to reverse engineer what constitutes an iBeacon from any other BLE device.
each APP would use it's own specific UUID, using the "major" and "minor" integer values to differentiate between beacons.
for example, the UUID would be associated with a chain of shops, major would identify the shop, and minor the aisle, or even a group of products.
scanning for unknown UUID's would not be very useful, as your app would not know what to do with the information.
the UUID is generated once and for all, using the "uuidgen" command in the terminal.
sadly there is no protocol to actually communicate with beacons, hence there is no standard to get the location of a beacon, or any other useful info.
it would have been so much better if we could open a connection to a beacon, usually the closest one, and obtain additional data from it, without having to be on the same WIFI network.
you either have to use bonjour to communicate with the device over WIFI, or use the major and minor id to obtain data from a webservice of some kind.
Unfortunately you cannot at this time search for an arbitrary iBeacon without first knowing the proximityUUID value. I've tried writing directly to COREBluetooth and, although you can discover and connect to transmitting beacons in your area, what you get back is jibberish with no relation to the BLE UUID. So you can't even confirm that the peripheral you have connected to is in fact an iBeacon.
This does not appear to be a limitation of the BLE spec, rather it is a limitation that has been imposed by Apple. It also appears that this limitation does not exist for the Android platform.
Until this gap is closed, Android will have a significant advantage over iOS in this area.
I disagree with previous comments that scanning for UUIDs would be useless. On the contrary, if you knew the beacon UUID, you could create a map of beacon/location/subject in the cloud and use it to navigate (assuming the beacon was fixed) using a web service. You could crowd-source the data so that eventually a very rich database of beacon UUID/location pairs would be available to all who wanted to write location apps. Perhaps this is why Apple is hiding the info; they may be holding this back for their own purposes.
According to Radius Networks (authors of the AltBeacon spec and the android-beacon-library it's not possible to identify a beacon using CoreBluetooth
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I have developed an app where the executing device acts as a beacon. As a scan result, different BLE devices appear with their respective RSSI value.
Is it possible to use these RSSI values to determine the own current position with AoA? I have already read some documentation on this, but I have not found anything like an algorithm.
How can AoA be implemented?
Can someone tell me the necessary steps to do this?
Is triangulation also possible if the referenced 3 points are moving or do you only search for the 3 nearest points??
So I'm trying to write a small applet which reads a serial number from a smart card using the javax.smartcardio library. Smartcard is connected with bit4id reader, and right now I successfully connect to the smartcard and read basic infos such as ATR and protocol (T=1).
I did some research about it (for example: http://www.cardwerk.com/smartcards/smartcard_standard_ISO7816-4_5_basic_organizations.aspx#table9)
But I'm not getting which specific list of command APDUs should I send to the card to get that serial.
Is there an "easy way" to do that, without reading tons of papers and manuals?
I guess I would need some datasheets to know how data is stored inside the card, right? or can i send some kind of command APDUs to retrieve this info from the card too?
Right now I only receive SW=6986 responses (not valid command)
Any advises, even only on the workflow, would be strongly appreciated!
There is no one way to read a smart cards serial number. "smartcard" is an ISO/IEC standard defined in the 7816 specification. Many industries use this standard like Mobile SIM, Bank Cards and Digital Signature Cards.
The implementation of the standard is different across industry with some industries advancing this basic standard with there own additional APDUs etc. like 3GPP/GSMA standard in the Mobile SIM case or the EMV standard in banking.
Anyhow, assuming that this card is smart-card ISO/IEC 7816 compliant you could possibly assume that it uses file base storage for card data. You could use the "SELECT" command (defined in 7816-4) to try to access all available files and print there information. i.e. files are identified by two bytes like 3F00 you could select from 0000,0001,0002....FFFF then if you get a successful select (status word 90) then read the contents and print it. Doing this you may be able to identify which file has the "serial" then you would only need to read this file going forward.
The above is not "easy" but may be a nice challenge and learning experience.
I was wondering is there a particular organisation you have to contact with regards to reserving a manufacturer ID for a bluetooth beacon? For instance, if we wanted to start mass producing them, ensuring no one else uses a particular ID?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Why yes there is. You must be member of the Bluetooth SIG. See here for more information and a list of current Manufacturer IDs.
As an addition to the previous answer regarding Bluetooth SIG and Company ID,
I will add a few things:
Company IDs are assigned by the Bluetooth SIG. In order to get one, your company must first become a member of the Bluetooth SIG. The entry level membership (adopter level) is free.
Once you are an adopter member, you can submit a request to get a Company ID (also free).
The company ID is necessary if you want to use the Manufacturer specific data field in order for example to have custom data in the BLE advertisement frames.
If you plan an building a 'simple' beacon product following, you might not need a Company ID. For Apple's iBeacon format for example, the frame format should use the Apple's company ID as well as their beacon format (see for example this page explaining the ibeacon format : http://www.warski.org/blog/2014/01/how-ibeacons-work/). I belive the Google Eddystone beacon format also do not require beacon manufacturer to have their own company ID.
Does anyone know if the use of only one static active RFID tag are able to detect motion(eg. moving human or objects) by itself without any use of other extra tags or sensors?
You could be able to do it by doing a permanent inventory and getting both the time and the signal strength received from the tag in each session. Both will be an indication that either orientation or distance has changed, but they are not exclusivelly corelated (you could have a change of both factors even if the tag is not moving) so you should do extensive test before settling on the solution.
Since you are talking about an active tag, there are manufacturers that incorporate motion sensors into their tag in order to save battery (tag emits more often when its moving), so you should contact them to see which of them can allow you to gather data from the sensor.
If you are thinking about fixing the tag on a wall and have the tag detect when someone passes by it, I do not know that such a product exist: there are tags that have thermometers or even humidity sensors integrated but not area of interest motion detection, for this you can use a wireless motion sensor.
my graduate project is about Smart Attendance System for University using RFID.
What if one student have multiple cards (cheating) and he want to attend his friend as well? The situation here my system will not understand the human adulteration and it will attend the detected RFID Tags by the reader and the result is it will attend both students and it will store them in the database.
I am facing this problem from begging and it is a huge glitch in my system.
I need a solution or any idea for this problem and it can be implemented in the code or in the real live to identify the humans.
There are a few ways you could do this depending upon your dedication, the exact tech available to you, and the consistency of the environment you are working with. Here are the first two that come to mind:
1) Create a grid of reader antennae on the ceiling of your room and use signal response times to the three nearest readers to get a decent level of confidence as to where the student tag is. If two tags register as being too close, display the associated names for the professor to call out and confirm presence. This solution will be highly dependent upon the precision of your equipment and stability of temperature/humidity in the room (and possibly other things like liquid and metal presence).
2) Similar to the first solution, but a little different. Some readers and tags (Impinj R2000 and Indy Readers, Impinj Monza 5+ for sure, maybe others aswell) have the ability to report a response time and a phase angle associated with the signal received from an interrogated tag. Using a set up similar to the first, you can get a much higher level of reliability and precision if you use this method.
Your software could randomly pick a few names of attending people, so that the professor can ask them to identify themselves. This will not eliminate the possibility of cheating, but increase the risk of beeing caught.
Other idea: count the number of attendiees (either by the prof or by camera + SW) and compare that to the number of RfID tags visible.
There is no solution for this RFID limitation.
But if you could then you can use Biometric(fingerprint) recognition facility with RFID card. With this in your system you have to:
Integrate biometric scanner with your RFID reader
Store biometric data in your card
and while making attendance :
Read UID
Scan biometric by student
Match scanned biometric with your stored biometric(in the card :
step 2)
Make attendance (present if biometric matched, absent if no match)
Well, We all have that glitch, and you can do nothing about it, but with the help of a camera system, i think it would minimise this glitch.
why use a camera system and not a biometric fingerprint system? lets re-phrase the question, why use RFID if there is biometric fingerprint system ? ;)
what is ideal to use, is an RFID middleware that handle the tag reading.
once the reader detects a tag, the middleware simply call the security camera system and request for a snapshot, and store it in the db. I'm using an RFID middleware called Envoy.