RE: Does Nordic Semiconductor have the hardware we need to realize our project?

Per Kjellsen — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 13:16:00 GMT

Thanks for the very good and helpful answer. I guess we better give ourselves some homework exercises from now on. ;)

RE: Does Nordic Semiconductor have the hardware we need to realize our project?

Janek Mann — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:55:31 GMT

Sheesh, do your own homework won't you? ;)

Anyway, a few notes to get you started: An iBeacon, strictly speaking, won't know that it has been observed by the phone. It is continuously advertising its UUID and Major/Minor IDs and the phone will observe these advertisements without needing to communicate back to the iBeacon. So iBeacon won't do what you want but regular BLE could (your app can stay in the background, be woken by iOS when your BLE module has been scanned, make connection to the BLE module and exchange its own identifier).

Integrating a BLE module with a GPRS module is a non-trivial exercise. Nordic's dev kits support BLE, obviously, but not GPRS so you'd have to look elsewhere for that.

Have you considered inverting your system? It's comparatively trivial for the app on the phone to make connection to your server and report the ids of the iBeacon it has ranged. This also would make it easier for the users to keep control over their own data, as you propose in point 5, and the BLE module side need never know (and can't leak) the id of the user.

Depending on your comfort level with embedded development, you could actually prototype the whole system using iOS devices (which can act as iBeacons, BLE device & host) before proceeding to an embedded implementation. The NRF51822 dev kits can act as iBeacons (see other posts on this forum) so may be a suitable option for that.