cuteprogramming

One month ago on 27th of March, my friend passed me a box of Estimote Proximity Beacons. That day marks the beginning of my journey towards a greater understanding of beacons and IoT.

Since the day I joined travel industry, I have always been thinking of providing a fun travel experience with beacon technology. When I joined Changi Airport team in 2015, I proposed to my manager the possibility of applying beacons in the airport. The idea was rejected. Now, I finally get the chance to build something with the small little Estimote Proximity Beacons.

Claiming Beacons

Every Estimote beacons are shipped with an unique ID which we can modify. By default, the beacon ID is in iBeacon format and consists of 3 values:

• UUID (Universal Unique Identifier): It contains 32 hexadecimal digits, split into 5 groups separated by hyphens.;
• Major;
• Minor.

The three values are hierarchical. The purpose of UUID is to distinguish our beacons from all other beacons in the network. Major and Minor values allow us to label the beacons with higher accuracy.

The iBeacon ID can be changed. One way is to use the Estimote app to do it. Since I wasn’t the owner of the beacons, my first step is to claim the beacon using the app. After I successfully claim the beacons, I can then proceed to retrieve detailed info of the beacons and modify their info.

Google Beacon Platform

After configuring our beacons, we can then proceed to claim the ownership of our beacons on the Google Beacon Registry. There is a mobile app called Beacon Tools available from Google to help us registering our beacons on Google Beacon Registry. There is a very interesting video interviewing Peter Lewis in the Coffee with a Googler season talking about the steps of beacon registration.

After that, we can associate a lot of information with our beacons. To do so, we first are recommended to use Google Beacon Dashboard. There is a very simple tutorial guiding us to use the Google Beacon Dashboard to associate the attachments with the beacons.

Read Attachments

I’m using the Nearby Messages API to retrieve the attachments from the beacons. I did a small little Android app (which is properly configured following the recommended steps) with the codes as shown below to achieve this.

package gclprojects.icymarshmallow;

...
import com.google.android.gms.common.ConnectionResult;
import com.google.android.gms.common.api.GoogleApiClient;
import com.google.android.gms.Nearby;
import com.google.android.gms.nearby.messages.Message;
import com.google.android.gms.nearby.messages.MessageListener;
import com.google.android.gms.nearby.messages.Strategy;
import com.google.android.gms.nearby.messages.SubscribeOptions;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity 
        implements GoogleApiClient.ConnectionCallbacks,
        GoogleApiClient.OnConnectionFailedListener {
    
    private GoogleApiClient mGoogleApiClient;
    private MessageListener mMessageListener;
    ...

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        ...

        mGoogleApiClient = new GoogleApiClient.Builder(this)
                .addApi(Nearby.MESSAGES_API)
                .addConnectionCallbacks(this)
                .enableAutoManage(this, this)
                .build();

        mMessageListener = new MessageListener() {
            @Override
            public void onFound(final Message message) {
                // Called when a new message is found.
                // Use message.getType().toString() to read the attachment Type
                // Use new String(message.getContent()) to read the attachment Value
            }
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onStart() {
        super.onStart();
        mGoogleApiClient.connect();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onStop() {
        super.onStop();
        mGoogleApiClient.disconnect();
    }

    @Override
    public void onConnected(@Nullable Bundle bundle) {
        if (mGoogleApiClient != null && mGoogleApiClient.isConnected()) {
            subscribe();
        }
    }

    ...

    private void subscribe() {
        SubscribeOptions options = new SubscribeOptions.Builder()
                .setStrategy(Strategy.BLE_ONLY)
                .build();

        Nearby.Messages.subscribe(mGoogleApiClient, mMessageListener);
    }
}

With the codes above, when beacon gets detected by the mobile app, the onFound method gets called for each of the attachment associated with the beacons. If we print the variable message into Log, we shall see something as follows.

Message{namespace='icy-marshmallow', type='string', content=[29 bytes]}

As shown above, the Value of the attachment is base64 encoded. So to read it, we just need to use new String(message.getContent()).

In the subscribe method, since we are only interested in messages attached to BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons, we use Strategy.BLE_ONLY.

Problem #1: Unsubscribe Method

When the app is running and another app comes into the foreground, we also need to stop subscribing to messages from the beacons. Otherwise, when we navigate back to the app, the messages can no longer be received even though we re-trigger the subscribe method.

So, I added the following codes.

@Override
protected void onPause() {
    if (mGoogleApiClient != null && mGoogleApiCLient.isConnected) {
        unsubsribe();
    }

    super.onPause();
}

@Override
protected void onResume() {
    if (mGoogleApiClient != null && mGoogleApiClient.isConnected) {
        subscribe();
    }

    super.onResume();
}

private void unsubscribe() {
    Nearby.Messages.unsubscribe(mGoogleApiClient, mMessageListener);
}

Problem #2: Stop Receiving Messages After Few Minutes

Another problem I notice is that the messages will stop be “found” after one to two minutes. However, if I re-trigger the mobile app, then I can start seeing the messages being detected for another one or two minutes.

To solve this issue, I use a simple timer which helps to check whether it has been quite some time the app doesn’t detect the beacons. If it’s more than 1 minute, then the timer will do a unsubscribe-then-subscribe-again action. This will help the mobile app to keep receiving the messages from the beacons. It also solve the problem of the mobile app re-visiting the beacons.

Problem #3: Geo-Location

This is not a real problem if we don’t need the geo-location information of the beacons. However, if we need to know the geo-location of the beacon, one simple way is to just use the LocationManager which provides periodic updates of the mobile geographical location.

package gclprojects.icymarshmallow;

...
import android.location.Location;
import android.location.LocationListener;
import android.location.LocationManager;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity 
        implements GoogleApiClient.ConnectionCallbacks,
        GoogleApiClient.OnConnectionFailedListener {
    LocationManager locationManager;
    ...

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        ...

        LocationListener locationListener = new LocationListener() {
            public void onLocationChanged(Location location) {
                // Record down the latitude and longitude of the mobile
            }

            ...
        }

        locationManager = (LocationManager) this.getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE);
    
        int permissionCheck = ContextCompat.checkSelfPermission(this, Manifest.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION);
        if (permissionCheck == PackageManager.PERMISSION_GRANTED) {
            locationManager.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.NETWORK.PROVIDER, 0, 0, locationListener);

            ...
        }
    }
}

Writing Data to Firebase

This step is optional unless the data collected needs to be stored for future use.

I use the following codes to write the beacon data to Firebase database.

package gclprojects.icymarshmallow;

...
import com.google.firebase.database.DatabaseReference;
import com.google.firebase.database.FirebaseDatabase;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity 
        implements GoogleApiClient.ConnectionCallbacks,
        GoogleApiClient.OnConnectionFailedListener {
    private DatabaseReference mDatabase;
    ...

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        ...
        
        mDatabase = FirebaseDatabase.getInstance().getReference();

        mMessageListener = new MessageListener() {
            @Override
            public void onFound(final Message message) {
                ...

                Beacon beaconInfo = new Beacon(...);

                Format formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss");
                mDatabase.child("Person A")
                        .child(formatter.format(new Date())
                        .setValue(beaconInfo);
            }
        }
    }
}

...

public class Beacon { ... }

To integrate our Android app with Firebase, our friendly Android Studio comes with a tool called the Firebase Assistance which will help us connect to the Firebase. The assistance also comes with short getting-started tutorial to show us how to cinfigure and add realtime database to our mobile app.

Installing Beacons in Changi Airport

Installing beacons in our Changi Airport is always one of my dreams to enhance the experience of millions of travelers flying in and out of the airport. In fact, currently the Armsterdam city is already making use of beacon technology to build a powerful beacon networks to give the people a better experience when they are walking around in the city. So why can’t we do the same in our friendly Changi Airport? =)