Repository Information
Repository is dedicated to the development of an android application to support a game called "Murder on the Orient Express". The app communicates with the Kontakt API for Eddystone/IBeacon based BLE Beacons.
We expose variables to the JNI interface to be grabbed by the game mentioned above once they're both running on the same android phone. Most of the development of this app has been done by Sydney Dimmock.
Debug information
If the project doesn't compile on gradle due to a missing dependency for a commons-math3 file, you can download and place the file from this website
Beacon Information
Using this to document useful information/features of the Kontakt beacons.
Data
The beacons constantly transmit data using Advertising Packets. By default they send this information every ~350ms but this can be changed. The data they transmit is roughly 30 bytes, more on the packet structure can be seen here: https://support.kontakt.io/hc/en-gb/articles/201492492-Advertising-packet-stcture
UUID
This is a 32 hexidecimal string split into groups of five such as:
ffffffff-1234-aaaa-1a2b-a1b2c3d4e5f6
12345678-abcd-88cc-1111aaaa2222
ffffffff-ffff-ffff-ffff-ffffffffffff
It serves the purpose of distinguishing our beacons on a newtwork where there may be others. This is unlikely to be a problem for us unless another group is using beacons aswell.
This can be changed by us through the app.
Major and Minor
These serve the purpose of dintinguishing beacons from one another. According to the documentation: https://support.kontakt.io/hc/en-gb/articles/201620741-iBeacon-Parameters-UUID-Major-and-Minor
Major is used to denote Groups of beacons, and Minor is used to identify individual beacons within that group. For our purposes we can follow this approach and put all of the beacons in the same major group e.g. 1 and identify each room in our game by a minor value.
Range
The app also lets us specify the effective range of each beacon, see :https://support.kontakt.io/hc/en-gb/articles/201621521-Transmission-power-Range-and-RSSI The minimum effective range we can go for is 2m. But we are still going to need some logic where we can handle the phone being pinged by multiple beacons and ensuring it does the correct thing in unity.