Gimbal beacon discovery

Question

Is it possible to discover Gimbal beacons using the iOS SDK? I want to use simple ranging but I don\'t know the UUID of the transmitter.

Answer 1

Interesting - I recently received a reply from Radius Networks that said ScanBeacon cannot identify Gimbal beacons - at least that's how I read it..

"Scanbeacon should display any device that is transmitting an ibeacon advertisement. We have had several reports that the little blue beacons that Qualcomm has been making available are not showing up with ScanBeacon. Our own investigation into these units is that they are not advertising the iBeacon identifiers.

There may be some configuration or other steps that need to be taken that we are not aware of. But the out-of-the-box state of the Qualcomm beacons appears to be no iBeacon advertisement."

Answer 2

YES, you can use Gimbals as iBeacons. You have to re-configure it using iBeacon configuration. Login to Gimbal website, create an account if you don't have one. https://proximity.gimbal.com/

Open Proximity tab. Click on Manage Configuration button at the top and create new configuration, select iBeacon as beacon type, assign UUID, major and minor. You can choose any UUID you'd like.

Now register your Gimbal beacon, and select your new configuration. You must open the beacon to get to the Factory ID that is required to register.

Download Gimbal manager app for iPhone, open it, select "Configure" option. Open Gimbal and remove battery, put the batter back in, and you should see your beacon in the Gimbal Manager app, click the Update button.

That's it, now you your Gimbal is in iBeacon mode.

Answer 3

If anyone interested, I found this useful post on http://beekn.net/2013/12/inside-gimbal-qualcomm-beacons-tackle-bluetooth-le-challenges/:

Actually, you can’t sniff the iBeacon UUID as Gimbal use their own implementation for their beacons. They use BLE to transmit encrypted IDs that change with each broadcast, so it needs to validate with the SDK / API to confirm which beacon ID this ties up to.

update: davidyoung is right. There is some info that I skipped in Gimbal's documentation:

If your application's use case requires you to use iBeacon technology, the Gimbal Series 20 beacon can be configured to broadcast iBeacon compatible BLE packets. To learn how to configure a beacon to be iBeacon compatible please read the Proximity Quickstart Guide. The Proximity framework makes it very easy to use both iBeacons and Gimbal beacons from the SDK and lets you manage them through the Gimbal Manager Portal.

Answer 4

To use iOS, you will need to know the UUID. There are some other options that do not require knowledge of the UUID.

1. If you have an Android device w/ 4.3 or later and support for BT4.0, you can use the free Locate application at the following link. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.radiusnetworks.locate

2. If you have a Mac w 10.9 or higher and support for BT4.0, you can use the ScanBeacon app ($9.99) available on the Mac App Store or at this link. http://www.radiusnetworks.com/scanbeacon-app.html

Good luck, and make sure you report back your findings to rest of the community!

David

Full Disclosure: My colleagues just firmly reminded me that I'm misbehaving by not noting that I work for Radius Networks, who provides the tools listed above, and am the developer of the second tool listed, ScanBeacon.