Beacon Device Locator

Description

The project centers around providing indoor locations of Android devices using Eddystone-Beacons.

Links

• Live: https://beacon-device-locator.appspot.com

Development

Prerequisites

Make sure you have the following tools installed:

• Google Cloud SDK
• php
• MySQL
• Android SDK

Installation

After cloning the repository, change to the sql-folder and run the bdl.sql on your Google Cloud SQL Instance.

After that, change to the web-folder, open the app.yaml and change the environment variables to those of your SQL-instance. Then deploy the App on your Google Cloud PHP App Engine by entering:

gcloud app deploy

Now open the Android project located in the android-folder and deploy the Android- App to the devices you want to locate.

Develop

Run the following command to start the server on localhost:

cd web dev_appserver.py .

Deploy

cd web gcloud app deploy

Configuration

insert your beacon positions into location table of your SQL-instance.

for example:

INSERT INTO location (name, tag, instance, lat, lng, x, y) VALUES ('location1', 'be2', 'instance1', lat1, lng1, x1, y1), ('location2', 'be1', 'instance2', lat2, lng2, x2, y2), ('location3', 'be3', 'instance3', lat3, lng3, x3, y3), ('location4', 'be4', 'instance4', lat4, lng4, x4, y4);

x and y are the positions of your beacons in metric coordinates. make sure your insert the right distances between beacons. instance is the Eddystone-Instance-Id of your beacon. This is just for identification issues and therefore optional to be set.

Configure your beacons to advertise the URL of the web interface of Beacon Device Locator. Make sure you add the tag of your beacon you defined in 'location'-table to the URL it is advertising, like so:

https://beacon-device-locator.appspot.com/?location=be1

Your Android-devices provided with the Beacon Device Locator-App should now be able to discover the beacons around and automatically send their measured distances to the PHP backend.

Optional

It may be necessary to define an offset for your device's measurements, because there is a high variation between the measured distances of different bluetooth modules.

You can adjust the offset of your device by updating the dataset of your device in device table of your SQL-instance:

UPDATE device SET offset = '1' WHERE name = 'device name' AND macaddress = '00:00:00:00:00:00';

The offset value is multiplied with the measured distances of your device.