BeaconAir On Raspberry Pi / iBeacons

BeaconAir is a Raspberry Pi based project that reads the advertising packets coming from iBeacons and roughly calculates the physical position of BeaconAir by Trilateration.  This is an application that uses the SwitchDoc Labs new iBeacon Python library that READS iBeacons on your Raspberry Pi.  It does not turn your Raspberry Pi into an iBeacon.  Lots of other people are doing that.

We have incorporated iBeacons into a couple of more projects.  For example,  putting an iBeacon on the collar of the cat to detect when the cat walks by.  This is an upgrade for the MouseAir Version 2 system to replace the VERY short range RFID tag in chipped cats.

The BeaconAir hardware block diagram is shown below.  This diagram graphically shows how the trilateration works with the Raspberry Pi reading iBeacon.

 

 

 

Below is the control panel for BeaconAir. It is done with the iPhone/iPad app RasPiConnect, allowing me to indulge my love of control panels without wiring up a single switch or LED.  We also get the bonus of being able to control my projects across town or across the world (as we did with Project Curacao – a Raspberry Pi / Arduino solar powered project – how cool is it to open a shutter and take a picture from 3500 miles away).

We use RasPiConnect to set the sensitivity parameters, modify the display, change the refresh rate and turn BeaconAir on and off.  RasPiConnect has a python server running as a process on the Raspberry Pi and we use a command file to send commands from the iPad received by the RasPiConnectServer to the BeaconAir software running as another process on the Raspberry Pi.  It’s pretty fast and the graphs update in an interesting visual manner.