Testing out BLE beacons with BeaconDB
This post chronicles an engineer's hands-on journey to test Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons with the open-source BeaconDB location service. It meticulously details the setup, configuration, and troubleshooting involved in contributing location data. The story culminates in a surprisingly mundane, yet insightful, discovery about the current state of BeaconDB's beacon processing, appealing to those who appreciate deep technical dives and practical experimentation.
The Lowdown
The author embarked on an experiment to test BLE beacons with BeaconDB, a community-driven successor to Mozilla Location Service, aiming to understand how it processes network-based location data without relying on Google. The goal was to contribute beacon observations and then query their location.
- The journey began with an overview of BeaconDB's origin, noting its continuation of Mozilla Location Service's work after the latter's retirement.
- A detailed explanation of BLE beacons, differentiating between Bluetooth, BLE, and various standards like iBeacon, Eddystone, and AltBeacon, was provided.
- The author selected Feasy FSC-BP104D beacons, detailing their configuration and preparation for testing.
- Initial API tests confirmed that unknown beacon MAC addresses correctly returned 404s, setting the stage for observation collection.
- Observations were collected using NeoStumbler during a dog walk, followed by attempts to query BeaconDB for location, which unexpectedly continued to yield 404s.
- Troubleshooting involved disabling NeoStumbler's moving device filter and then directly submitting observations via BeaconDB's geosubmit API, still without success.
- The ultimate discovery, found by inspecting BeaconDB's source code, was that while the service accepts and stores BLE beacon data, it does not currently utilize it for geolocation.
Ultimately, the experiment didn't yield the expected geolocation results but provided a valuable, if anticlimactic, learning experience about the current capabilities of BeaconDB and the intricacies of network-based location services.