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In my application, we are implementing the beacon functionality using Estimote sdk. But this sdk will detect only their products. Is there any API which detect all the beacons of different vendors and which gives beacon details like UUID,Major and Minor..Does anyone have an Idea. Please let me know..

thanks

naresh
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1 Answers1

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Yes, the open source Android Beacon Library is designed to detect beacons from a wide variety of vendors. Out of the box, it detects open source AltBeacons, but can be configured with a single line of code to detect proprietary beacons. See here for more info: Is this the correct layout to detect iBeacons with AltBeacon's Android Beacon Library?

This library has been around for nearly two years so it is very full featured and mature. The fact that it is open source helps prevent against proprietary lock-in.

Full disclosure: I am lead engineer on this project.

Community
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davidgyoung
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  • Thanks..Can we do it using android default bluetooth API? – naresh May 22 '15 at 13:40
  • Yes, you can detect beacons with the Android bluetooth APIs. But all you will get is a byte array for every advertisement received. You won't get decoding of the beacon identifiers, distance estimates, background launching of your app, callbacks when beacons first appear or disappear, etc. All of these higher level features are what the Android Beacon Library builds on top of the default Android scanning APIs. – davidgyoung May 22 '15 at 14:22
  • Thanks. I ran the android-beacon-library-reference project in eclipse. It's not monitoring or ranging the devices. It's says "Cannot find match for this device. Using default". But we have the beacon devices from estimote vendor near by. Can we do any additional setup to detect devices? – naresh May 26 '15 at 13:44
  • The log line "Cannot find match for this device. Using default" just means that it can't find an exact match in the distance calculation database -- it doesn't have anything to do with matching beacons. It will still work despite this message. If you aren't detecting beacons, be sure you have properly entered a BeaconLayout per this link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25027983/is-this-the-correct-layout-to-detect-ibeacons-with-altbeacons-android-beacon-li – davidgyoung May 26 '15 at 14:25
  • Also, make sure you can see the Estimote breacon devices using an off-the-shelf Locate beacon detector app, which is built on top of the exact same library: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.radiusnetworks.locate&hl=en – davidgyoung May 26 '15 at 14:26
  • The problem is, I didn't set the beacon layout format of estimote vendor. As you said, Data base doesn't have the estimote beacons. Now I set the beacon layout format as "m:2-3=0215,i:4-19,i:20-21,i:22-23,p:24-24". then It's detecting the devices. Thanks. – naresh May 26 '15 at 14:55
  • Can we add multiple beacon layout formats like estimote,kontakt,..? By default it will detect Altbeacons. It means, Is it like estimote, Kontakt..? or is it specification which meets some vendors? – naresh May 26 '15 at 14:55
  • I am trying to integrate in my app. It's already having some library projects like google-play, Wheel. Now When I am adding Android Beacon Library. When I am adding "manifestmerger.enabled=true" to manifeast file then "R can't be resolved". I clean all the projects and restart the eclipse but it won't help. I didn't understand what's wrong here. can you please help me. – naresh May 26 '15 at 15:09
  • If manifest merging is giving you trouble on Eclipse, you may find it easier to use this alternate configuration mechanism where you don't use a library project and instead just copy the jars and edit your AndroidManifest.xml manually: http://altbeacon.github.io/android-beacon-library/alternate-configuration.html – davidgyoung May 26 '15 at 15:26
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/78892/discussion-between-naresh-and-davidgyoung). – naresh May 27 '15 at 11:10