Today, Estimote is excited to announce its compatibility with Eddystone, a new open multiplatform packet format for BLE beacons, released by Google.
Consistent with Estimote’s developer friendly approach, we’re on board supporting the protocol from day one. If you’ve ever purchased Estimote Beacons you can download our newest firmware supporting both iBeacon and Eddystone. Simply download our latest Android app to update your beacons to the latest firmware and you’re ready to start testing Eddystone.
Update your existing beacons today, or buy new beacons that fully support Eddystone technology now.
Internet for the physical world
Eddystone is an open BLE packet, currently comprising three frames: Eddystone-URL for broadcasting URL addresses, Eddystone-UID for broadcasting beacon’s ID, and Eddystone-TLM for beacon telemetry.
Broadcasting URLs with beacons might sound familiar if you’ve ever encountered Physical Web™. Developed inside Google, it’s aiming to bring context of physical locations and objects to mobile devices with websites. Why websites?
There’s an app for that might apply to many activities, but not necessarily to most restaurants, small businesses, or public venues yet. Take a movie theater, for example. The cinema owner may want to make her poster displays promoting upcoming releases more interactive with beacons, but all of her patrons may not have her venue’s app on their phones.
Beyond Physical Web
Of course Physical Web is not a universal answer. In many cases, you will want to create interactions much more complex than displaying a website. Take some of the coolest startups building solutions based on beacons. Downtown makes waiting in a queue to order food a thing of the past. Robin turns offices smart. Stealz changes customers into brand advocates. None of this could be accomplished without a native experience. That’s why beacons supporting Eddystone can broadcast another frame, Eddystone-UID, consisting of a unique ID. Apps can be listening for particular UIDs in a similar manner to how they monitor for iBeacon regions (based on UUID, Major, and Minor values). So if you want to build an app for contactless payments, a museum audio guide, or a home automation tool, Eddystone lets you do that too.
Estimote Beacons also enable you to easily switch between the two frames, to deliver the right experience. Coming back to our theatre example: beacons may broadcast YouTube links to people without the app. But if there is an app and it’s gaining traction, you may want to broadcast the UID to deliver more engaging content, like letting people book a ticket for the next screening with a single tap.
The third frame inside Eddystone protocol is Eddystone-TLM. It comprises data about a beacon’s hardware, like battery level or sensor readings. Frequency of broadcast does not have as big an impact on user experience as the other frames, so our beacons broadcast it less frequently, saving battery life. Eddystone-TLM makes it easier to keep tabs on your beacons. Since hardware status is part of the data packet, you don’t need to connect to a beacon to read it. You’ll appreciate how much time it can save if you’re managing a large network of beacons.
Google built Eddystone with all developers in mind. The whole packet is open and multiplatform. This brings system-wide support for beacons to Android for the first time. So far, if you wanted to build an app that would deliver similar contextual experiences on both Android and iOS, you had to use separate SDKs and choose between one of the available Android frameworks. Eddystone works on both platforms. Plus it’s extensible. It allows for adding custom frames, so you can extend the packet with more data.
See for yourself and reach out
If you want to start immediately discovering what Eddystone is like, head to our Developer Portal, where we describe the protocol in detail. We’ve prepared a brief introduction to the new format that will guide you through the basics of Eddystone and Physical Web.
Estimote has been building tools for developers to create contextual apps for more than two years, and it gets more exciting each week. We’d love to share our excitement with you. If you have any questions and thoughts about Estimote Beacons and support for Eddystone, don’t hesitate to ask. You can reach us on Twitter and the old school way. Happy coding!
Also, on Monday July 20th 10 AM PST we’ll be holding a special webinar about building great experiences with Estimote Beacons and Eddystone. Join us on YouTube!
Lukasz Kostka, CTO, Estimote
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist, Estimote