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google / eddystone

Specification for Eddystone, an open beacon format from Google
Apache License 2.0
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Question: Let a web page start a device to advertise as beacon? #159

Open Tobbyte opened 8 years ago

Tobbyte commented 8 years ago

This may be a stupid question, but would it technically be possible to use this library in a normal web page? So to configure a device that supports peripheral mode (e.g. Nexus 5X) to advertise as a Eddystone Beacon?

scottjenson commented 8 years ago

Not sure which library you're talking about but as you're talking about a webpage I'm assuming you're talking about WebBluetooth and having a web page use JS to start broadcasting a URL?

Short answer is no. The longer answer is that V1 of WebBluetooth will connect to a single device at a time. V2 (a few quarters later) will support scanning for >1 beacon. There hasn't been much discussion round broadcasting. The simple constraint is that it would require background permissions so it could run if the web page isn't frontmost and that requires a lot more work.

Tobbyte commented 8 years ago

thanks for your answer, @scottjenson! The library I was talking about was this: https://github.com/google/eddystone/tree/master/libraries/javascript/eddystone-advertising. The idea was to use the URL broadcasted by a beacon (here: a device) to share small amounts of information. I'm not looking to connect devices or to scan/broadcast in background. Any ideas on this? (or didn't I got your point?)

scottjenson commented 8 years ago

Ah. I understand now. That specific library is from a different team and is for ChromeOS only. I'm not sure what it would take to port it to another OS (e.g. Android) but I would expect it would be quite a bit of work as it would involve background processing and extra user permissions.