Xamarin.iOS 7 : iBeacons - Part 1: Advertizing

One of my favorite new feature of iOS 7 is the addition of iBeacons. You'll find plenty of articles explaining how it'll change the way you do shopping (if you still shop offline), allows indoor localization, and even more. Glue a beacon on your kids, and you'll know when they go too far away (digital leash). Attach one to your wallet and your phone will tell you you're leaving the house with no cash. Applications are endless.

iBeacons is a protocol on top of Bluetooth LE (Low Energy, also advertised as Bluetooth Smart, and part of the Bluetooth 4.0). It doesn't require any new hardware and is nothing really new by itself. What's new and exciting is its position in iOS: first-class citizen, integrated with CoreLocation, working in the background, ...

The recipe: advertising your position

As of now, the only objects you can use as iBeacons are iOS devices. The protocol should be made available soon, allowing 3rd party components to appear, and at that time they should sell for a few dollars a piece (based on a general purpose BT chip, like the BLE112, a beacon should cost around 40$ to build. Prices will surely drop by using cheaper and specialized chips).

Turning your iOS device into a beacon is really only a few steps:

1. Initialize a CLBeaconRegion

That'll be your beacon. uuid and identifier are mandatory. Major and minor are optional. There's a trick here, uuid doesn't have to be unique. All beacons of a common group will probably have the same uuid, and different major/minor versions.

var beaconId = new NSUuid ("5a2bf809-992f-42c2-8590-6793ecbe2437");  //uuidgen on MacOS, nguid in VS
var beaconRegion = new CLBeaconRegion (beaconId, "yourOrg.yourBeacon");

2. Initialize a CBPeripheralManager

var peripheralManager = new CLPeripheralManager (new PeripheralManagerDelegate(beaconRegion), DispatchQueue.DefaultGlobalQueue, new NSDictionary ());

class PeripheralManagerDelegate : CBPeripheralManagerDelegate
{
    CLBeaconRegion beaconRegion;

    public CBPeripheralManager (CLBeaconRegion beaconRegion)
        this.beaconRegion = beaconRegion;
    }

    public override void StateUpdated (CBPeripheralManager peripheralManager)
    {
        //State will be Unsupported on devices like iPhone4 and prior, PoweredOff if BT is down
        if (peripheralManager.State != CBPeripheralManagerState.PoweredOn)
            return;
        var options = beaconRegion.GetPeripheralData (null);
        peripheralManager.StartAdvertizing (options);
    }
}


And that's it.

Notes and further reading

• As devices BT ids changes from time to time, your device will be sometimes advertised twice. That won't happen with real iBeacons.
• If you want to advertize in the Background, enable "Acts as Bluetooth LE accessory" in your info.plist
• Read Region Monitoring if you need more details.