uBeacon

uBeacon is a simple Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon library for MicroPython. It can be used to create beacons for BLE advertisement or to decode advertised beacons. It does not handle the advertisement or scanning part directly, as different MicroPython forks handle Bluetooth in various ways.

Supported BLE beacons:

• AltBeacon
• Eddystone-UID
• Eddystone-URL
• iBeacon
• LinTech Beacon
• RuuviTag (decode only)
• MikroTik (decode only)

Installation

Install with mip

You can install uBeacon with mip using the following command:

mpremote mip install github:rroemhild/ubeacon

Copy files

You can also manually copy the files from the ubeacon directory to your MicroPython device. You may exclude the beacon types that are not required for your project, ensure to keep the __init__.py file as it is mandatory.

mpremote mkdir lib/ubeacon
mpremote cp ubeacon/* :lib/ubeacon

Usage

The uBeacon library provides several examples in the examples directory, where you can find examples on how to advertise a beacon and decode beacons scanned by your device.

Advertise Beacon

To advertise a beacon, you first need to create a beacon object using one of the provided classes. For example, to create an iBeacon object:

from ubeacon.ibeacon import IBeacon

beacon = IBeacon(
    uuid="acbdf5ff-d272-45f5-8e45-01672fe51c47",
    major=42,
    minor=21,
)

Once you have created a beacon object, you can start advertising it using i.e. the bluetooth.BLE module:

import bluetooth

ble = bluetooth.BLE()
ble.active(True)
ble.gap_advertise(250_000, adv_data=beacon.adv_data, resp_data=beacon.resp_bytes, connectable=False)

Decode Beacon

To decode a beacon, you first need to obtain the beacon data from a scan result. The data is typically stored in a format like adv_data. For example:

from ubeacon.altbeacon import AltBeacon

adv_data = b"\x02\x01\x06\x1b\xff9\x05\xbe\xac=\xf9=Z\xa1\xf2G\xbb\xa3\xcf>I\xe6\xa8\x9b\xb6\x00\x11\x00*\xbb#"
beacon = AltBeacon(adv_data=adv_data)
print(f"{beacon,!r}")

Filter Beacon

The uBeacon library provides a BeaconFilter class that allows you to filter beacons based on their UUID, Major, and Minor. For example:

from ubeacon import BeaconFilter

# Initialize the filter object to filter by uuid and major
beacon_filter = BeaconFilter(
    uuid="7dc04cb6-ed25-420a-ae02-f31674a1f946",
    major=1337,
)

if not beacon_filter.match(beacon):
    print("Beacon does not match filter.")

Beacon Naming

The beacon name is included in the response data.

To ensure compatibility with different MicroPython forks, uBeacon utilizes micropython.unique_id to obtain a unique ID based on the Wi-Fi MAC address. To change the beacon name, it can be set after instantiation. For example, to use the last 2 bytes from the Bluetooth MAC address:

import bluetooth
from ubeacon.eddystone import EddystoneUID

NAMESPACE = "85b9ae954b59c3d6f69d"
INSTANCE = "000000001337"

ble = bluetooth.BLE()

beacon = EddystoneUID(NAMESPACE, INSTANCE)
beacon.name = b"ubeacon " + hexlify(ble.config("mac")[1][4:]).upper()