CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ionic-frameworkbluetoothcordova-pluginsbluetooth-lowenergyeddystone
Nadir Bertolasi
Nadir Bertolasi

Reputation: 527

BLE broadcast without pairing

I'm working on a physical web oriented application.

I would like to have some devices that continuously broadcast string messages using bluetooth low energy. The end point is a ionic application that should just receive and show this messages when required.

Is it possible to implement this kind of behaviour without a paring phase between the bluetooth broadcaster and the mobile phone?

At the moment I worked with with eddystone protocol, building a beacon with my raspberry pi, but I have some limitations due to 17 characters length constraint of url sizes. (I'm using url as a string to pass data).

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4307

Answers (1)

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 64941

You do not need to pair mobile devices with beacon devices to receive their signals. Beacon signals are sent as Bluetooth LE advertisements which may be read by all nearby BLE devices without pairing. This is true for both iOS and Android.

If you plan to use Ionic, there is a Cordova iBeacon plugin you can use. I am not aware of one for Eddystone.

With iBeacon you are even more limited on data passing, pretty much limited to four bytes on iOS. In order to display different messages, you would have to embed a lookup table in your app or use a web service to do the same, either way looking up the string based on the beacon identifier. With four bytes. That would give you 2**32 (4 billion) possible messages.

Full disclosure: I am the lead developer on the Android Beacon Library open source project, on which the aforementioned Cordova plugin is based.

Upvotes: 1

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