Raspberry Pi 3 as an Eddystone URL beacon

Details

Mar 16, 2016

This tutorial will show you how you can take your Raspberry Pi 3 and turn it into an Eddystone URL beacon.

What you will need:

A Raspberry Pi 3
Power supply for the Raspberry Pi
SD card for the raspberry pi

What is an Eddystone beacon:

Eddystone is a protocol specification by Google that allows a Bluetooth low energy device to broadcast one way messages. See https://github.com/google/eddystone. Currently the specification defines three types of messages that can be broadcast: a UID, a URL, or telemetry.

The magic of the Eddystone beacon is on the app side where your phone listens for these broadcast messages and either displays an alert when it detects something or performs some kind of action.

In this tutorial I will show you how to setup your Raspberry Pi 3 to broadcast a URL.

Setting up the Pi

Download Raspbian from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
Install the Raspbian Image
- See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/

Find the ip of the raspberry pi with from your laptop/desktop

 You can try the Raspberry Pi Finder. 
 See http://lifehacker.com/the-raspberry-pi-finder-easily-locates-your-pis-ip-addr-1702081021
 or With nmap (you can install nmap with macports on OSX) 
 $ sudo nmap -sP 192.168.2.0/24
 or
 $ arp -a | grep "b8:27"

Log into the Pi (password is raspberry)
- ```
 $ ssh pi@<the_ip_of_your_pi>
```
Look at the help of the hciconfig command
- ```
 $hciconfig -h
```

Enable the Bluetooth device

 pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo hciconfig hci0 up

Set the Bluetooth device to “advertise and not-connectable”
- ```
 pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo hciconfig hci0 leadv 3
```

Enter the Beacon Advertising Data

 pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo hcitool -i hci0 cmd 0x08 0x0008 17 02 01 06 03 03 aa fe 0f 16 aa fe 10 00 03 77 65 62 67 61 7a 65 72 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Here is a breakdown of the payload

Option	Description
0x08	#OGF = Operation Group Field = Bluetooth Command Group = 0x08
0x0008	#OCF = Operation Command Field = HCI_LE_Set_Advertising_Data = 0x0008
17	Length. The hexadecimal 17 converts to 23 decimal which is the number of bytes that follow
02	Length
01	Flags data type value
06	Flags data
03	Length
03	Complete list of 16-bit Service UUIDs data type value
aa	16-bit Eddystone UUID
fe	16-bit Eddystone UUID
0f	Length. The hexadecimal 0f converts to 15 decimal which is the number of bytes that follow
16	Service Data data type value
aa	16-bit Eddystone UUID
fe	16-bit Eddystone UUID
10	Frame Type = URL
00	TX Power (this should be calibrated)
02 changed to 03	URL Scheme (http:// = 0x02)(https:// = 0x03). See 2016-13-09 edit comments.
77	‘w’ in hexadecimal
65	‘e’ in hexadecimal
62	‘b’ in hexadecimal
67	‘g’ in hexadecimal
61	‘a’ in hexadecimal
7a	‘z’ in hexadecimal
65	‘e’ in hexadecimal
72	‘r’ in hexadecimal
08	.org (.org = 0x08)
00
00
00
00
00
00
00
00

The command above broadcasts my blog’s URL https://webgazer.org.
If you want to advertize a different URL enter the URL of the link that you want to advertize in the link below.

http://yencarnacion.github.io/eddystone-url-calculator/

To detect the Raspberry Pi beacon with an iPhone follow the steps in the video below which outlines how to enable Chrome’s Physical Web extension on iOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxPcPXSE_O0

On Android, your phone should detect the URL if you have Android 4.3.2 or higher with bluetooth turned on, location turned on, and Chrome location runtime permission turned on. Seehttps://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6239299?hl=en. However, I had to install the Physical Web App from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=physical_web.org.physicalweb&hl=en to make it work.

Edited 2016-13-09

As pointed out in the comments, Google made a change so as to require https in order for chrome to detect the URL Beacon. So in order to fix a change was made in the URL Scheme from http:// = 0x02 to https:// = 0x03.

Discussions

phy221995 wrote 06/18/2019 at 18:04

hello, i have tried given steps.

i am able to dtect beacon using beacon scanner app.

but not shown any popup notification.

i have enable BLE as well as location.

am i missing anything?

I am using android mobile which has higher version then required.

Can you please help me?

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Rich wrote 02/21/2017 at 18:16

To continue with more info (I'll make my own blog post on this soon).

Because Google requires https, I was using a meta-redirect to the website which had the real content which was not https. I am not sure if google changed things or I just missed it with my testing but Google now detects this and will not allow such URLs. If you go to their physical web validator, it returns "Result Filtered (Non HTTPS URL)."

I guess I'll try javascript next :)

Are you sure? yes | no

Rich wrote 01/29/2017 at 02:46

Have some weirdness going on. I had a URL which was working and I added a directory to the URL. It appeared to be working OK but now I can't see it on the one phone. I appear to be having some certificate issues recently though so that may be it. Weirdly though, the original URL works fine still.

Looks like it was due to the certificate issue. I guess the original just hadn't been rechecked yet or something.

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Rich wrote 01/27/2017 at 02:15

I did a bit of unscientific testing and it looks like for my uncased Raspberry Pi, a TX Power value of F0 is about correct. I'll post again if I get a more accurate value. This allows devices to get an approximate distance to the beacon. Note that it doesn't help anything to deliberately set this wrong if you are wanting to hide that as it would be possible to find it by triangulation anyway.

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Rich wrote 01/25/2017 at 07:00

Do you have any info on the feasibility of rotating beacons? I.e. advertising multiple URLs one after the other? I may give it a try and see how it goes. While messing around, I did manage to get two URLs up at the same time and I wasn't even trying.

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Jacob wrote 01/12/2017 at 14:02

Hi Yamir,

I have got it all set up, i can successfully advertise your link (https://webgazer.org.) which can be picked up by my android device. but when I try to use my own link (http://jallen.myds.me) it does not work at all. I have tried advertising the likes of google (https://www.google.co.uk) and it does not work either. I am aware that whether it is a a http or https matters but I am confused as to why when trying to advertise google i get nothing? Can you help me?

Thanks,
Jacob

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Yamir Encarnacion wrote 01/14/2017 at 16:38

@Jacob I was always able to get both http://jallen.myds.me/ and https://www.google.co.uk/ to work with the free iOS eBeacon App. http://jallen.myds.me/ will never work with Physical Web because it does not use https. However, I was able to get https://www.google.co.uk/ to work sometimes by changing the TX power. Try $ sudo hcitool -i hci0 cmd 0x08 0x0008 1b 02 01 06 03 03 aa fe 13 16 aa fe 10 19 01 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 2e 63 6f 2e 75 6b 2f 00 00 00 00. Notice that the TX power is set to 19 Hex (25 Decimal). I was also able to get the beacon with Chrome with $ sudo hcitool -i hci0 cmd 0x08 0x0008 1b 02 01 06 03 03 aa fe 13 16 aa fe 10 50 01 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 2e 63 6f 2e 75 6b 2f 00 00 00 00. Here, the TX power is set to 50 Hex (or 80 Decimal). I am not sure what the optimal value for TX power should be. Maybe someone else with more knowledge about URL beacons can answer that. But, since the beacon always works with eBeacon and it does not always work with Chrome, I am thinking that Google is filtering what gets shown to you or they have a bug.

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Rich wrote 01/25/2017 at 05:50

Hi Yamir, interesting info. I was able to get webgazer.org to show up in Google Nearby and a couple of other URLs but not the one for my site nor if I tweaked the webgazer.org to be slightly different (change the r to a d for example) I am guessing URLs need to be registered for Nearby even though I saw some docs that said Eddystone URLs did not need to be registered. Note that this *is* with https urls.

Edit: I am testing a theory that the web page requires a title to be visible. I also did not have an icon but neither did webgazer.org so I don't think that's it.

Edit2: That, indeed, appears to be it. I added a title tag (I was also missing the head section) and it appears to be working. Note that the page is cached so it might take a little while to go through. Now to work out if play uses favicon or the icon tag. I do see a request for favicon.ico but I bet the link tag will work too.

For what it's worth, it looks like the requests are coming through the google servers so they are tracking this stuff!

Are you sure? yes | no

luisa.rocha wrote 09/21/2016 at 13:28

Hello. I'm using putty.exe to configure the Raspberry Pi 3 and following your steps (5 to 8), but Raspberry returns an error:

< HCI Command: ogf 0x08, ocf 0x0008, plen 32
17 02 01 06 03 03 AA FE 0F 16 AA FE 10 00 03 77 65 62 67 61
7A 65 72 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> HCI Event: 0x0e plen 4
01 08 20 00

What am I doing wrong?

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luisa.rocha wrote 09/21/2016 at 17:33

Apparently, it has always been working, because iPhone found my Raspberry now.

Are you sure? yes | no

Robert Palister wrote 08/18/2016 at 14:44

Ran all these commands on my Raspberry Pi 3 with a fresh copy of Jessie installed, setup my own URL with the calculator provided, no beacon found on Android or iOS. Reboot Pi, still nothing. Tried replacing my URL with the command provided in this tutorial to his URL, nothing. Reboot Pi, still nothing.

Has anything changed since this tutorial was published?

Thanks!

Are you sure? yes | no

Yamir Encarnacion wrote 09/14/2016 at 01:36

@Robert Palister It seems Google has made a change. Using the May 2016 Raspbian Jessie I was able to get an iPhone using the free eBeacon app to detect the URL with the provided instructions of the calculator. Maybe now the URL beacons need to be registered as stated at https://developers.google.com/beacons/get-started and pointed out by @vishvagopala. I note that nothing in the instructions explains how to save the configuration, so if you reboot, you must re-run the commands outputted by the calculator or save them permanently in a file that gets run when the raspberry pi boots. This can be done via as explained on the following link http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/188042/running-a-script-during-booting-startup-init-d-vs-cron-reboot

Are you sure? yes | no

Yamir Encarnacion wrote 09/14/2016 at 01:47

@Robert Palister After reading https://developers.google.com/beacons/get-started more carefully, I discovered that you now need an https url. So the instructions as provided will not work because they point you to a http url. No registration necessary for Eddystone-URL beacons for now.

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Ralph Manzano wrote 07/19/2016 at 18:16

physical web application only supports https right? have you got yours working with your site http://webgazer.org?

Are you sure? yes | no

Yamir Encarnacion wrote 07/24/2016 at 08:48

@Ralph Manzano I am not an expert in the technology. However, If you take a look at the specification at https://github.com/google/eddystone/tree/master/eddystone-url you can see under "URL Scheme Prefix" that you can encode "http://" with Hex 0x02 (what I used). You can also see that other possibilities include "https://", "http://www.";, and "https://www.";

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vishvagopala wrote 05/31/2016 at 07:00

Dear Yamir, i made the beacon using the instructions. Perfect so far. Now i was trying to register this beacon using beacon tools app (from google) so i can use it with chrome. But i get an error -can't connect to beaon' . Anyone can help in that. Looks like we need to put beacon in configuration mode. I already tried changing leadv to 0 in the above instructions

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Yamir Encarnacion wrote 07/24/2016 at 08:55

@vishvagopala I am not an expert in the technology so I do not have and answer for you at the moment. However, I will add something that maybe was not clear from the original instructions. The "TX Power" needs to be calibrated. I simply left it at 0. The specification states "Tx power is the received power at 0 meters, in dBm, and the value ranges from -100 dBm to +20 dBm to a resolution of 1 dBm" See the section titled "Tx Power Level" at https://github.com/google/eddystone/tree/master/eddystone-url

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fhlipZero wrote 03/29/2016 at 01:50

very cool and will make this weekend!

Are you sure? yes | no

Raspberry Pi 3 as an Eddystone URL beacon

Description

Details

What you will need:

What is an Eddystone beacon:

Setting up the Pi

Discussions

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Raspberry Pi 3 as an Eddystone URL beacon

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What is an Eddystone beacon:

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