BeaconAir – Reading IBeacons on your Raspberry Pi

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 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.

SunRover

SwitchDoc Labs is starting on a new application for iBeacons involving a semi-autonomous solar powered robot called SunRover.  It will use the new SunAir solar power controller (just off of a successful Kickstarter and now in stock), the WatchDog Timer and contain sensors as well as the SwitchDoc Labs WeatherPiArduino board and a SwitchDoc Labs WeatherRack for weather information.  We also will be using our DS3231 Real Time Clock, the SwitchDoc Labs DS3231 Python library and RasPiConnect for our control panel.

MouseAir

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. There is also the other problem with pet’s RFID tags of there being three different standards for pet RFID tags.

So our three way solution to detecting the cat in MouseAir is now:

• Ultrasonics
• Vision Recognition with Pi Camera
• iBeacon on the cat collar

Below is the control panel for BeaconAir. It is done with the iPhone/iPad app RasPiConnect, allowing us to indulge our love of control panels without wiring up a single switch or LED.  We also get the bonus of being able to control our 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).