Beacon Support

9.9A

"The term iBeacon and Beacon are often used interchangeably. iBeacon is the name for Apple's technology standard, which allows Mobile apps (running on both iOS and Android devices) to listen for signals from beacons in the physical world and react accordingly. In essence, iBeacon technology allows Mobile apps to understand their position on a micro-local scale, and deliver hyper-contextual content to users based on location. The underlying communication technology is Bluetooth Low Energy."

Quoted from:

http://www.ibeacon.com/what-is-ibeacon-a-guide-to-beacons/

Also see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon

 Beacon Features:

1.   Each Beacon transmits three pieces of information as follows:

UUID

This is a sixteen byte string known as a universally unique identifier used to differentiate a large group of related beacons.

Major

This is a two byte value used to distinguish a smaller subset of beacons within the larger group.

Minor

This is a two byte value meant to identify individual beacons.

2.   Beacon monitoring enables programs to detect movement in-and-out of range of the beacons.

3.   Beacon monitoring is limited to twenty regions and has different events to notify the listening app (and user) of entry/exit in the region.

4.   Beacon ranging provides a list of beacons detected in a given region, along with the estimated distance from the user's device to each beacon. The distance (between transmitting iBeacon and receiving device) is categorized into three distinct ranges:

 a. Immediate - Within a few centimeters

b. Near - Within a couple of meters

c. Far - Greater than 10 meters away

5.   Beacons are referenced by regions which consist of a program provided identifier, a UUID, a major number and a minor number.

6.   The beacon support is provided by the following Cordova plugin:

https://github.com/petermetz/cordova-plugin-ibeacon

All beacon interactions and generated events are produced directly from this package.

For additional information, see the AppBeacon and AppBeaconStatus methods for the CLIENT object in the PL/B Language Reference (plb.chm).