Understanding Beacons and Types of Beacons
Mayur Ratwani
Technology Advisor - eCommerce | Shopify | Shopify Plus | Odoo ERP | Shopify Apps | WordPress | Laravel
What is a Beacon?
Just like LightHouse which sends signal to communicate with ships, Similar to Lighthouse, a beacon uses Bluetooth Low energy signal to communicate with any smart phone device in its range.
How do Beacons look like?
Its basically a Hardware, a tiny and simple device which has a CPU, lithium chip batteries and radio. You can see them in different shapes, too.
What are the different types of beacon protocol?
There are a few types of Beacon protocols, those are iBeacons, Eddystone, AltBeacon, GeoBeacon and few others. I am covering following protocols in this article:
1) iBeacons: Designed by Apple
The very first beacon protocol in the market was announced by Apple and they named it iBeacon which works with IOS and Android, both. It transmits UUID which is basically a string of 24 numbers communicating with an mobile app in the smartphone.
There are 3 components to identify iBeacons:
- UDID: Unique Universal Identifier, this unique ID splits into 5 group and has total 32 hexadecimal digits. Each beacon has its own UDID which needs to be linked with your account.
- Major: By this ID you will know that the particular beacon is located at which place.
- Minor: By this you will know the beacons location at a specific area, for example Levis Store in a Mall.
2) Eddystone: Designed by Google
It works similar to iBeacon, It is open and cross platform supporting any platform that supports BLE beacons including Android and IOS.
Eddystone has 4 components:
- UID - a unique ID Number
- URL - a Web Address
- EID - to increase the security.
- TLM - contains telemetry data (Not available in ibeacon)
The most advantage of using eddystone is that it can let you send the url, so even if user do not have mobile app installed, they can get push notification message in their device.
Stay tuned to know more about Proximity Marketing Platform using beacon technology or contact me any time to see working demo or Proximity Marketing Platform using ibecons and Eddystone.
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7 年Some more information on other 2 types of beacons i.e. Altbeacon and GeoBeacon 1. AltBeacon (Radius Networks) Radius Networks announced AltBeacon in July 2014. This open source beacon protocol was designed to overcome the issue of protocols favoring one vendor over the other. Advantages: Open source; Compatibility with other mobile operating platforms; More flexibility with a customizable source code. 2. GeoBeacon (Tecno-World) Tecno-World (Pitius Tec S.L., Manufacture-ID 0x015C) announced GeoBeacon in July 2017. This open source beacon protocol was designed for usage in GeoCaching applications due the very compact type of data storage. Advantages: Open source; Compatibility with other mobile operating platforms; High resolution coordinates TLM-Data support (Battery life) 8 Bytes of user data source - wiki Most of the companies make use of ibeacon protocol.