PunchClock: Fun With iBeacons

http://www.panic.com/blog/punchclock-fun-with-ibeacons/

by macrael • 12 years ago

126 47 12 years ago

panic.com

post_break• 12 years ago

This is really awesome. I wish I had the skill to make something like this work.

dav-2• 12 years ago

Panic always makes such beautiful and cool things.

jimmcslim2• 12 years ago

I'm a little surprised that there isn't broader availability of iBeacons at this stage... I feel I should be able to walk into an Apple store and buy a 10-pack of them for some reasonable price.

tedmiston• 12 years ago

The Estimote beacons are the closest I've seen to this idea, but I would like to hear about more competitors.

http://estimote.com/

clemesha2• 12 years ago

I'd say Gimbal: https://gimbal.com is a main competitor (see my comment to the parent), but I'd also be interested in hearing about others.

clemesha2• 12 years ago

I'm currently developing an app based on Gimbal: https://gimbal.com (made by Qualcomm).

My experience so far has been pretty good using their SDK (which works on iOS and Android) and their admin web interface, and the Gimbal devices themselves are not that expensive.

I'd be interested to hear the experiences of others using Gimbal..

jsemrau3• 12 years ago

Gimbal beacons have the suckiest battery life. The ones that I had expired after only two months of usage. Of course you can replace the battery (big plus) but the maintenance would be costly if deployed at a customer site.

bitpew2• 12 years ago

I recently (Feb 2014) had the opportunity to evaluate different iBeacon hardware for a project.

http://roximity.com

* "ok" price

* horrible customer communication

* in reality to want to sell you their services and not the iBeacons.

* not configurable (proximity id, major, minor)

* really long shipping time to europe (4 weeks)

https://www.sticknfind.com

* "ok" price

* nice form factor (small)

* not really iBeacon compatible. They say you can flash their beacons to make them compatible, but i haven't found out how since their support is not responding.

* not configurable (proximity id, major, minor)

http://kontakt.io

* good price

* great support

* major, minor configurable. proximity id not

* form factor kinda bulky

* they seem to be able to deliver huge amount of beacons

http://www.easibeacon.com

* great price

* great support

* nice form factor (same as stickNFind)

* fully configurable (proximity id, major, minor)

* the company is relatively young

Can't say anything about the battery life yet, but the batteries were replaceable in each case.

jsemrau3• 12 years ago

Why would you? Any Bluetooth 4.0 supporting spec is a potential beacon. That makes roughly 400 mil devices sold.

maxsilver• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, Gelo sells beacons in exactly this manner -- you can just buy 10 beacons, and they ship the same day you order them.

http://www.getgelo.com/beacons/

(Disclaimer : I work with the organization.)

TheFuture2• 12 years ago

Because standalone iBeacons to trigger geofences is not what I believe Apple intends to use them for. This is what Estimote is selling.

Sure the geofence triggering is kinda cool, but I've yet to see a practical use of it. Seems like "interactive museum tour" is the thing everyone keeps coming back to. If this is what Apple wanted to do with iBeacons, they would be selling them for a couple bucks in Apple Stores. But iBeacons aren't a consumer device. I think much more likely to see "iBeacon ready" hardware sold by Apple and other 3rd parties.

I think iBeacon protocol will become part of other devices, as a way to add proximity detection for the iPhone/apps that could interact with that device.

How about a DSLR camera that I can pair with by touching my iPhone to it? Creating ad-hoc multi-peer networks between devices by being near them. Play a game on your phone on a nearby TV without connecting to same WiFi. Or wearables knowing which other wearables are nearby. This kind of natural, "magical" interaction is very Apple.

Gmo• 12 years ago

How about a DSLR camera that I can pair with by touching my iPhone to it?

Isn't it what NFC is for ? Except for Apple stubbornly deciding not to add it to the iPhone ?

csexton• 12 years ago

My company, Radius Networks, does sell different hardware configurations as well as software to broadcast as a beacon.

http://www.radiusnetworks.com/

I really love the USB powered model, especially for something like PunchClock. No batteries means no dead batteries.

http://store.radiusnetworks.com/products/radbeacon-usb

We also released a number of open source projects that can help with projects like this. Including the ibeacon cli (if you are on a mac just `brew install ibeacon`), or if you want more than iOS check out the Android iBeacon Library (https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service).

Sorry for the shameless plug!

dav-2• 12 years ago

I just bought your MacBeacon app the other day. Works like a charm, thanks!

personZ2• 12 years ago

Cool project.

I've always wondered what iBeacon offers, in most practical implementations, that latent wifi doesn't? If I wanted to do something similar on an Android device, for the purposes of conversation, I would register for the SCAN_RESULTS_AVAILABLE_ACTION event, and watch for the appearance or disappearance of SSID of APs that are interesting, and of course there are lots of utilities and tools that do exactly this (e.g. when I near home control these settings, etc). Ping a web service with updates, etc.

SSIDs can of course be cloned, just as iBeacons can. Neither are truths that they are what they say they are.

mikeash• 12 years ago

Walled garden answer: Apple doesn't let you write an app that wakes up when a SSID becomes visible, but you can write an iOS app that wakes up and does something when an iBeacon becomes visible.

Technological answer: iBeacons allow more selectivity and precision. You can be confident that a visible iBeacon is within 30ft or so, rather than 300+ft for WiFi, and with a little calibration you can measure the distance reasonably well. WiFi can tell you "the user is in [a section of] the building", while iBeacons can tell you "the user is standing in front of exhibit X".

gress• 12 years ago

The walled garden answer is strictly true, but moot in this case, since you could also use region monitoring to wake up your app, and that will use SSIDs indirectly.

personZ2• 12 years ago

You can be confident that a visible iBeacon is within 30ft or so, rather than 300+ft for WiFi, and with a little calibration you can measure the distance reasonably well.

Doesn't BLE have a range of some 150 feet+? That doesn't differ much from the range of 802.11g. Both of them have amplitude that you can measure, from which you could guess at distance (especially if you're near the same source multiple times).

Of course a store isn't going to set up a bunch of APs to notify you when you're near a display, but aside from channel overlap and ugliness technically they could. And outside of the walled garden that you mentioned, it would be just as suitable for the role it filled in this application.

ghshephard• 12 years ago

Some of the WiFi management tools that I've seen can locate a devices to within a 4' radius based on triangulating the signal strength. There may be others that can bring it in to an even more detailed location.

The advantage of iBeacons, of course, is that you can do this cheaply.

jsemrau3• 12 years ago

You could play games with it (www.inshadows.asia)

NamTaf• 12 years ago

This would be incredible to strap on to every middle-and-above management type in my company so I could get things signed off when I actually needed to

hayksaakian• 12 years ago

So is there any plan for interop with non apple devices?

flyt• 12 years ago

No, because this is made by Panic, a company that only makes software for OS X and iOS.

superuser2• 12 years ago

Is there anything close to standardized enough for non-Apple devices to implement this sort of functionality?

grrowl• 12 years ago

Theoretically, there's no reason you couldn't write a similar app for Android devices which support BLE[1] to reimplement this functionality, but Panic have only ever written for Apple devices.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18906988/what-is-the-ibea...

bitpew2• 12 years ago

There is a open source iBeacon library for Android:

https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service

Decoding the iBeacon packets is quite easy, but you need a device that supports BLE. Currently there are only a handful of Android devices that support it.

kator2• 12 years ago

I've done quite a bit of iBeacon stuff including emulating them with Raspberry Pi's and writing an iOS app that measures the OS behavior against iBeacons. It's pretty interesting stuff, there are a couple of my beacon's I'm using to test iOS behaviors with that are buried in a New York city park near my place.

If you find one let me know.

I suppose I could write some of my findings up but I've been a bit busy...

jsilence• 12 years ago

Hm, geocaching TNG anyone?

smallegan2• 12 years ago

I'm interested in using this for home automation purposes. Accurate information about what room of the house I am in allows for the home automation interface to be greatly simplified by only showing options to control nearby items.

TheFuture2• 12 years ago

Wouldn't it make more sense if the nearby items themselves were broadcasting iBeacons? I think this is what Apple intends to do with the protocol.

smallegan2• 12 years ago

It would certainly be useful but currently a lot of things don't have Bluetooth LE and are controlled via zigbee, z-wave, wifi, etc.. So knowing what room you are in is very useful in itself because it can help identify what target devices you may want to control.

cmollis• 12 years ago

we built an iBeacon app for a party we threw last Christmas. It was pretty cool, actually.. although Apple gave us a hassle accepting the app for whatever reason. Here's a write up.. http://objectlab.github.io

andreamazz• 12 years ago

I really like that design. We developed a similar idea a couple of weeks ago, when we received our Estimote beacons. Here you can find the blog post about it with the sources, albeit it's a simpler and rougher implementation: http://andreamazz.github.io/blog/2014/07/01/fun-with-ibeacon...

bergie• 12 years ago

We built something similar as open source with regular Bluetooth and WiFi sensors a while back: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/smart-collaboration-space/

abava2• 12 years ago

check out this also http://wifichat.linkstore.ru

abava2• 12 years ago

We built similar stuff with Core Bluetooth (so, any Android phone is Ok): http://bdp.linkstore.ru

zachdunn2• 12 years ago

Love this. We've been working on a version of this for the office at Robin (http://getrobin.com). Biggest challenge so far has been getting interop across Android and iOS. Beacons are reliable if you have a binary "are they or aren't they here?" but a bit harder to map to smaller rooms when certain Android devices register a signal difference of 4X depending on physical orientation -- that was a fun one to figure out.

josephpmay2• 12 years ago

Just like half of the other commenters, a team I was on built something similar at PennApps (a college hackathon) back in Februrary. It was a really fun project to work on.

(http://tracktimeapp.com)

josephpmay2• 12 years ago

The code: https://github.com/thestranger/pennapps

PunchClock: Fun With iBeacons

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