BeaconAir Control Panel

BeaconAir Lives! It is up and running with ble (Bluetooth Low Energy – iBeacons) scanning and position estimating.  There are  a few bugs left.  This project is using a Raspberry Pi to read iBeacons and figure out where the Pi physically is located (note:  this is opposite of most articles.  Most articles turn the Pi into a iBeacon.  We are reading iBeacons).

For those of you that have followed my projects over the years, you know we love control panels.  BeaconAir is no exception.

This control panel is done on an iPad using an app RasPiConnect (www.milocreek.com).   You write a python server portion on the Raspberry Pi and then you set up the app to communicate with the Pi and you are off to the races.  We just finished an article about how to build a control panel using RasPiConnect for MagPi magazine Issue 25 (coming out in early July, 2014).   This is now the fourth project that we are using RasPiConnect for and we are really getting good at it.  We love the new LIVE controls that they just released for RasPiConnect and ArduinoConnect.   We’ll be publishing the source (Local.py) for the RasPiConnect server on https://github.com/switchdoclabs in the next month.

The BeaconAir software uses our new iBeacon scanning library and our new communication method between BeaconAir and the RasPiConnect Server.  This is the second time I have used this method (first one was with MouseAir) and we talk about this method in the MagPi article and we’ll publish a posting on the new version in July.

The full article on BeaconAir will be published in Raspberry Pi Geek Magazine also in July.

My favorite part of this control panel is how we did the map of the house we used for testing.  You can see the icons for the lights and the iBeacons scattered around the house plan.  Usually, we would do this in the lab and office, but the house is much more interesting for this project.  Plus it amuses the cat.

We went into this project thinking that it would be hard to do the map, but it turned out to be trivial in HTML and in RasPiConnect.  We will describe how we did this in another posting next week.  Back to the salt mines.