Building an Apple iBeacon with CircuitPython #CircuitPythonDay #CircuitPython #Bluetooth

iBeacons are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices used in location awareness applications such as welcoming people as they arrive at an event or broadcasting information to compatible devices at a nearby museum exhibit. The term iBeacon is Apple’s implementation of the technology and reportedly, is what they use at their stores to send notifications to iPhone users as they enter/leave the store.

iBeacons can be bought online, but the purpose of this short post is to reuse a BLE capable small microcontroller running CircuitPython as an iBeacon. In my case I’ll be using Particle Xenon device, but this Adafruit Microcontroller would work just fine (or this one).

The Moving Electrons blog goes through how to set up CircuitPython on the hardware and on an iOS device.