Re:Shortwave: iBeacon-powered messaging
by arthurcolle on Saturday May 10, 2014 @11:43PM
(#7727678)
hey are you thinking of open sourcing any part of the code? i can think of a lot of further applications of this, especially relating to mesh networking
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Hi! I helped build Shortwave. There are some interesting limitations to the ibeacon and corebluetooth APIs that we used - corebluetooth can broadcast in the background (but not receive) while ibeacon can receive in the background (but not broadcast).
Our goal was to be able to recognize that two shortwave users were within range of each other, even if both phones were locked, so we had to find a way to make these two APIs work together.
I'm working on a blog post that details how we did this. I hadn't thought of open-sourcing the code, but people seem interested so I'm more than happy to do so. I do have to warn you - this was my first foray into objective-c, so I'm sure there will be some shortcomings :)
I'll post it to hackernews when I wrap it up. I'm also @alonsoholmes on twitter, in case it doesn't make the front page.
Cheers!
- ah
Isn't iBeacon built on top of Core Bluetooth? What stops you scanning in the background with CB?
Re:Shortwave: iBeacon-powered messaging
by eddieroger on Sunday May 11, 2014 @10:25AM
(#7728770)
Nothing. You can continue to range and monitor in the background, but you can not be a beacon in the background while using the blessed methods for doing so. I haven't dug in to CoreBluetooth directly, but the CLLocationManager abstraction layer doesn't allow you to broadcast in the background.
Yes that's true. Check https://github.com/CharruaLabs/AltBeacon to understand how it's done.
Re:Shortwave: iBeacon-powered messaging
by cryptnotic on Monday May 12, 2014 @02:15AM
(#7731413)
You should patent it.
There is nothing to patent, is just iOS Bluetooth Low Energy.
Hi,
We are working in a project that also uses Bluetooth Low Energy for nearby interaction (though is not a chat). So we do some similar stuff to have Beacons advertising in the background. Due to the demand we saw here, we decided to open source our library which is called AltBeacon. You can find it in https://github.com/CharruaLabs/AltBeacon , we need contributors so feel free to check it and contribute.
It's actually very simple. We've released a much more featured version of this at http://getloopd.com
Are you guys planning to open source any of this? I'd love to dig into this a little deeper....