Bluetooth-beacons with Meteor

mobile
1

I’ve bought some beacons from Kontakt.io and want to develop a solution with Meteor, however I’m not so familiar with developing with Meteor/Javascript/Cordova.

Are there anyone that have any experience with a bluetooth-plugin with Meteor/Javascript that can give me some hints/tips?

Also I’m not quite sure if the plugins on Cordova’s site will suffice, since most of them target Estimote beacons.

2

Hey,
Interestingly enough, I just built a Meteor app that can connect to iBeacons, notify you when they are out of range, and keep track of when you last saw them.

I did this for a school project - http://pluv.io: Where we built a hydrophobic, unforgettable, unloseable, and better designed umbrella. I designed the app’s UI based around this product, but I can definitely make it more open to ibeacons in general. If you’re interested, I can open-source this.

TODO:

  • Program the beacon (allow you to change its name…etc).
  • Show list of available bluetooth devices in the area (right now it connects to the first one it finds)
  • Allow it to connect to multiple beacons and keep track of them.
  • Convert from using a setInterval( scan for beacons) to see if beacons are still in the area to the ranging/monitoring function that uses less battery and keeps a constant connection to bluetooth devices.
3

Hi, sorry for the late answer!

Your project sounds really interesting. However, I was wondering about a specific case about using beacons from Kontakt.io. Have you used them in your project or have you used beacons from Estimote? As for my understanding there seems to lack support for the connection with Javascript for those beacons, although I might be wrong.

Did you use a specific Cordova-plugin to connect with your beacons?

4

No worries,
Yeah it should work with any ibeacon or bluetooth device. I just bought a random one of off amazon and it worked like a charm. Yes, I use cordova plugins to interact with the native bluetooth commands.

5

Hi arjunrajjain,

I would be curious to see how you manage to integrate the beacon and communicate with it. Is your project open sourced?

Cheers,
Francis

1 Like
6

I’ve also been playing around with iBeacons and Meteor and published a package that should help integrate iBeacon detection into your Meteor app. This package does this by treating iBeacons as reactive data sources. You can see the docs here: https://atmospherejs.com/mbanting/reactive-ibeacons

Hope it helps!

1 Like
7

This is really cool! Thank you for this!

8

@mbanting: Question about the limitation for monitor/ranging several regions.

Does this mean that I cannot instantiate multiple “ReactiveBeaconRegions” with different major and minors? Or does it only matter with the UUID?

9

Unfortunately, you can’t instantiate multiple “ReactiveBeaconRegions” with different majors and minors right now. I hope to find a way around this limitation in the underlying Cordova plugin and have added an issue to track this. In the meantime, if your beacons all have the same UUID, you can setup a single beacon region with that UUID (leaving out the major and minor IDs). Then in your reactive code, go through the beacons array and work with the beacons that have the major/minor IDs you’re interested in. While this won’t help for monitoring (since the inRegion property could be updated by any beacon with the UUID, including ones with the major/minor you’re not interested in), this could help you get by for ranging purposes.

10

Hi Arjun,

did you also have the region limitation like “mbanting”?

I would be interested to have a look at your project if you are still so kind to open-source it.

Cheers,
Paul

11

Hi,
i need some help with the ibeacon plugin.
could you help me out on this post

thnx in advance