Manage Bluetooth® Beacons through a cross-platform .NET Standard library. Get details for the open Eddystone™ Bluetooth beacon format from Google, as well as beacons comparable to Apple® iBeacon™. Supported on all platforms that are compatible to .NET Standard 1.3+ - including Windows 10, Xamarin (iOS, Android), Mac and Linux.
Directly use the received Bluetooth Low Energy Advertisement notifications from the base operating system and let the library take care of the rest for you. It extracts, combines and updates unique beacons, associated individual frames to the beacons and parses their contents - e.g., the beacon IDs, URLs or telemetry information like temperature or battery voltage.
NuGet Library Download | Windows 10 Example App Download
Bluetooth Low Energy / LE (BLE) allows objects to be discovered - for example, it enables your phone to connect to a heart rate belt or a headset. A Bluetooth Beacon does not connect to your phone; instead, it continuously transmits small amounts of data - no matter if someone is listening or not. The efficient nature of Bluetooth ensures that the battery of a beacon nevertheless lasts several months.
Phones and apps can react to Bluetooth Beacons - e.g., to trigger specific actions when the user is close to a physical location. In contrast to GPS, this works even indoors and has a much better accuracy.
To differentiate between different beacons and to give each one a unique meaning in your virtual world, beacons send out information packages. These are formatted according to a certain specification. While the general way of broadcasting these information packages is standardized by the Bluetooth Core specification, the beacon package contents are not. Platforms like Windows 10 come with APIs to receive Bluetooth LE advertisements, but does not contain an SDK to work with common beacon protocols.
Provides an easy way for C#/.NET apps to manage beacons and to parse their information packages.
As a developer, you only have to feed the received Bluetooth advertisements into the library - it will analyze, cluster and parse the contents, so that you can easily access the latest data from each individual beacon.
Clustering is achieved through the Bluetooth address (MAC): the constant and regular advertisements of multiple beacons are matched to unique beacons.
The next step is analyzing the conents of the advertisement payloads. The library can work with data comparable to Apple iBeacon (Proximity Beacon) frames, as well as the open Eddystone specification, including three frame types that have been defined:
Instead of having to implement the specifications yourself and worry about encodings and byte orderings, you can directly access the latest available information through convenient classes and properties. For unknown frames of other beacon types, it's easy to extend the library to parse the payload in a derived beacon frame class and make use of the beacon management and information update features of the library.
Note: for using Apple iBeacon technology in your services (in order to make your services compatible to iOS devices), you need to agree to and comply with the Apple iBeacon license agreement.
BluetoothLEAdvertisementReceivedEventArgs for UWP apps)The included example apps continuously scan for Bluetooth LE advertisements. They associate these with known or new Bluetooth MAC addresses to identify beacons. The individual advertisement frames are then parsed for known frame types - which are currently the three frame types defined by the Eddystone beacon format by Google, as well as Proximity Beacon frames (compatible to iBeacons).
The example app comes in two versions:
To allow apps to receive data from Bluetooth Beacons, you have to ensure Windows 10 is configured correctly.
public sealed partial class MainPage : Page
{
// Bluetooth Beacons
private readonly BluetoothLEAdvertisementWatcher _watcher;
private readonly BeaconManager _beaconManager;
public MainPage()
{
// [...]
// Construct the Universal Bluetooth Beacon manager
var provider = new WindowsBluetoothPacketProvider();
_beaconManager = new BeaconManager(provider);
_beaconManager.BeaconAdded += BeaconManagerOnBeaconAdded;
_beaconManager.Start();
}
// Call this method e.g., when tapping a button
private void BeaconManagerOnBeaconAdded(object sender, Beacon beacon)
{
Debug.WriteLine("\nBeacon: " + beacon.BluetoothAddressAsString);
Debug.WriteLine("Type: " + beacon.BeaconType);
Debug.WriteLine("Last Update: " + beacon.Timestamp);
Debug.WriteLine("RSSI: " + beacon.Rssi);
foreach (var beaconFrame in beacon.BeaconFrames.ToList())
{
// Print a small sample of the available data parsed by the library
if (beaconFrame is UidEddystoneFrame)
{
Debug.WriteLine("Eddystone UID Frame");
Debug.WriteLine("ID: " + ((UidEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).NamespaceIdAsNumber.ToString("X") + " / " +
((UidEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).InstanceIdAsNumber.ToString("X"));
}
else if (beaconFrame is UrlEddystoneFrame)
{
Debug.WriteLine("Eddystone URL Frame");
Debug.WriteLine("URL: " + ((UrlEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).CompleteUrl);
}
else if (beaconFrame is TlmEddystoneFrame)
{
Debug.WriteLine("Eddystone Telemetry Frame");
Debug.WriteLine("Temperature [°C]: " + ((TlmEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).TemperatureInC);
Debug.WriteLine("Battery [mV]: " + ((TlmEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).BatteryInMilliV);
}
else if (beaconFrame is EidEddystoneFrame)
{
Debug.WriteLine("Eddystone EID Frame");
Debug.WriteLine("Ranging Data: " + ((EidEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).RangingData);
Debug.WriteLine("Ephemeral Identifier: " + BitConverter.ToString(((EidEddystoneFrame)beaconFrame).EphemeralIdentifier));
}
else if (beaconFrame is ProximityBeaconFrame)
{
Debug.WriteLine("Proximity Beacon Frame (iBeacon compatible)");
Debug.WriteLine("Uuid: " + ((ProximityBeaconFrame)beaconFrame).UuidAsString);
Debug.WriteLine("Major: " + ((ProximityBeaconFrame)beaconFrame).MajorAsString);
Debug.WriteLine("Major: " + ((ProximityBeaconFrame)beaconFrame).MinorAsString);
}
else
{
Debug.WriteLine("Unknown frame - not parsed by the library, write your own derived beacon frame type!");
Debug.WriteLine("Payload: " + BitConverter.ToString(((UnknownBeaconFrame)beaconFrame).Payload));
}
}
}
}The Core Universal Beacon Library is available in C# for .NET Standard 1.3 - it is therefore compatible to Windows UWP, Xamarin (Android / iOS / UWP / Mac / Linux) and other platforms supported by .NET Standard. Extension libraries are currently included for UWP and Xamarin/Android to interface with the platform Bluetooth APIs.
To keep up to date, either watch this project or follow me on Twitter.
If you want to use the Universal Beacon Library from your own app, the easiest option is to use the NuGet package manager in Visual Studio 2015 to automatically download & integrate the library:
Alternatively, use the NuGet Package Manager console as described here: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UniversalBeaconLibrary
To try the Xamarin (Android / UWP) or Windows 10 (UWP) example apps, download the complete library package from this site.
The Universal Bluetooth Beacon library is classified as stable release and is in use in several projects, most importantly Bluetooth Beacon Interactor for Windows 10.
Any open issues as well as planned features are tracked online: https://github.com/andijakl/universal-beacon/issues
The library is released under the Apache license and is partly based on the Eddystone™ specification, which is also released under Apache license - see the LICENSE file for details. iBeacon™ is a Trademark by Apple Inc. Bluetooth® is a registered trademarks of Bluetooth SIG, Inc.
The example application is licensed under the GPL v3 license - see LICENSE.GPL for details.
Developed by Andreas Jakl and Chris Tacke https://twitter.com/andijakl https://www.andreasjakl.com/
Library homepage on GitHub: https://github.com/andijakl/universal-beacon
Library package on NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UniversalBeaconLibrary
You might also be interested in the NFC / NDEF library: https://github.com/andijakl/ndef-nfc