iBeacon 101: Smarter iBeacons with Swift

iBeacon is an increasingly popular protocol that utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, enabling devices to broadcast a signal to dedicated listeners and perform actions based on proximity. For example, when a shopper walks into a store, their device emits a signal, and upon being received by the listener, a deal or recommendation could be sent to that shopper in realtime. This opens the doors for a wide variety of use cases, from consumer applications all the way to the Internet of Things.

However, let’s make our iBeacons even more intelligent. Traditionally, we have a listener (detector) listening for a signal from an emitter. But what if we want to enable bidirectional communication between iBeacons? We want to extend it’s functionality by extending what both iBeacons can send to one another.

And we’ll show you exactly how to do this in our comprehensive iBeacon tutorials. In this series, we’ll use Swift programming language.

• iBeacon Overview: a look at how iBeacon works, and an introduction to the iOS SDK.
• iBeacon Emitter: building our iBeacon emitter (publisher)
• iBeacon Detector: building our iBeacon detector (listener/subscriber)

The end result will look something like this:

We’ll create more Beacon tutorials down the road for more programming languages and devices (in fact, we already have one for Android beacon and Tessel beacon!). We look forward to seeing what you build with your smart beacons!