Eddystone and iPhone

[Tobias]

Hi all. I am new to BLE and the nrf52 chip. What I would like to do is use the device as a beacon, and also being able to connect to the beacon from both iPhone and Android.

From what I understand the iPhone can not start apps from listening to Eddystone in general, read that there is s special mode of Eddystone that mimics the iBeacon. Is that true? And can the nrf52 softdevice handle sending out 2 eddystone profiles?

And most importantly, how do I do to listen for incomming connections directly after the beacon is sent? This needs to be battery powered.

I find the documentation to be a bit sparse, it is hard to read anything about what different flags mean and do. Or is there more information about the API:s that I have not found?

Many thanks in advance Tobias

[Anders Strand]

Hello.

BLE advertising is when a device broadcasts an advertising packet of up to 32 bytes. When you write code for a BLE device, you can freely decide what to include in this advertising packet. You can read about BLE advertising in our advertising tutorial, this blog about advertising, or this adafruit guide.

An iBeacon or eddystone beacon is a device which broadcasts a certain advertisement packet. Both these beacon types have open advertisement packet structures, so they are easy to create.

It would not make sense for an eddystone beacon to mimic an iBeacon. If it does, it is just an iBeacon. It might be to allow iOS devices to scan for them in the background though. Can you post a link to where you read about this? I agree that is was kind of hard to find precise information on the subject. This article over at estimote describes the difference between iBeacon and Eddystone well. The eddystone github page can also be helpful.

Yes, the nRF52 softdevice can send out two profiles. You must switch the advertising packet periodically. See this and this post about that.

Beacon advertising is usually done in non-connectable mode. If you want to be connectable, this is something you set in your advertising config. See the above tutorial. The device will listen for connection requests for a little while after broadcasting the advertisement, and then sleep.

-Anders