Have a look at the following figure that shows what motes look like:

Estimote Beacons or motes

Estimote was set up with $ 3.1 million seed funding in December 2013 and have been well featured in digital press news stories, including the TechCrunch and Wired magazines. Their marketing material boasts that their motes can run up to 2 years on a single watch battery, and their stylish silicon casing means that they work beautifully outside too.

Estimote beacon sensors are already being used by large retailers in Europe, and they're working to build a large network of their sensors in the U.S.

Estimote has opted to provide a richer feature set than most beacons by including accelerometer hardware and temperature sensors. Although these sensors are only accessible when using the Estimote SDK, they do allow for a more creative set of projects to be developed.

Estimote has definitely ridden the crest of the tsunami of iBeacon technology in the press and has some very high-profile customers. At the time of writing this book, the beacons themselves were available as a $ 99 development kit containing three beacons and weren't available for larger volumes as a commercial purchase.

Estimote offers an SDK for managing and interacting with their beacons and has also provided an iOS app available in the App Store, which includes a number of development tutorials and tools such as:

Some of the Estimote companion app's features

ROXIMITY has taken a completely different approach and made their beacons completely centrally managed. There's no Bluetooth beacon configuration and beacons can be repurposed for multiple apps simultaneously. You can use a single ROXIMITY beacon within an app dedicated to a shopping mall for direction and also for a loyalty app of a retail store within the mall itself because they don't use the UUID/major/minor broadcasting triplet. These values have been removed from you as a developer when using ROXIMITY beacons. Instead, you can work with ROXIMITY beacon identifiers and must use the ROXIMITY SDK; you can't use the Core Location framework.

The ROXIMITY beacons and hardware are most definitely geared up for mobile marketing, and so may not be the best choice for highly customized functionality. However, if your goal is to provide ROXIMITY-based marketing to specialist apps such as sporting venues, shopping malls, or airports, then ROXIMITY beacons and the SDK are probably the most comprehensive beacons to use straight out of the box.

ROXIMITY features are all centrally managed via the online merchant dashboard. By following ROXIMITY's approach to beacon management, you, as a solutions provider, would need to complete the following steps to deploy beacons at your target location:

ROXIMITY merchant dashboard notification message dialog

By following this simple approach, you already have tons of features available without having to write a single line of custom code:

RedBearLab is a Hong-Kong-based company that specializes in BLE technology exclusively. They have many BLE products such as Arduino shields and have an established name in hardware.

The RedBear Beacon B1

RedBearLab adopted a simple, no-nonsense approach in their iBeacon product, the RedBear Beacon B1, and have focused on the hardware, not branding.

Much bigger than both the ROXIMITY and Estimote options, the RedBear Beacon B1 is powered by two AAA batteries, offering five times the battery life of beacons that are powered by a CR2032 coin battery.

RedBearLab don't provide any online management platform for their beacons; however, they do offer over-the-air firmware upgrades, which means that firmware updates can be easily done via their RedBear BeaconTool app available via the App Store (http://bit.ly/RedBear-BT).

The RedBear Beacon B1 also features very simple administration via the BeaconTool app and is very secure compared to other beacons since it has a hardware configuration button, which activates the configuration mode for a short period. Combining this hardware feature with the fact that you can very easily set custom administrator passwords on the beacon means that these devices are far less likely to be hijacked than other vendor beacons. We will discuss the security issues surrounding iBeacons in Chapter 9, iBeacon Security – Understanding the Risks.

Finally, the RedBear Beacon B1 has one unique feature that is both elegant and genius—a power switch. None of the other beacons I've had the pleasure of trialing have this feature, which when developing an app makes perfect sense. A hardware power switch allowing you to turn a beacon on and off makes simulating entering and exiting a beacon region very simple.

RedBear BeaconTool app for iOS

The RedBear Beacon B1 and RedBear BeaconTool app provide simple configuration, robust hardware security, and power features, which mean it's the perfect development companion.

There are of course plenty of other vendors and more and more new beacons coming onto the market all the time, so there'll be lots of amazing new vendors for you to choose from.

The three discussed are just some of the most popular beacons that I've had the pleasure of testing and so can share my experiences. If you're buying beacons in bulk, then you might also want to consider using a trade website such as http://www.alibaba.com/. I've had some great beacons and some not so great beacons through this online trading platform, but overall, my experiences have been good. The three beacons we've already discussed range between $ 23 per unit and $ 35 per unit. However, when buying direct from suppliers on Alibaba.com, I've personally bought very good units for as little as $ 4 per unit.

When buying iBeacons from trade websites, my recommendation is that you order a subset first, maybe 5 to 10 units. Most vendors will charge you $ 2 to $ 3 more per unit for this type of transaction and offer you economies of scale for buying more in future.

When buying iBeacons from trade sites, you should also look out for beacons that have conformed to the Made for iPhone program; a key way of identifying these is when they show the iBeacon logo.

Made for iPhone logo

The companion app is used throughout the book and lets you use your Mac as an iBeacon. It can be downloaded from the download section of the Packt Publishing website and comes preconfigured with all of the beacons used throughout the book.

Using the companion app, you can simulate physical beacons in the real world using any Bluetooth-4.0-powered Mac running OS X Mavericks or Mountain Lion.

Companion app broadcasting an iBeacon signal

The companion OS X app has beacons configured already for every tutorial in this book. To start a beacon, simply select the beacon from the tutorial from the menu on the left, and then tap on the power button in the right panel.

The features of the companion app can be seen in the following table:

Button	Use
	Add new iBeacon profiles to suit your own development needs using the add button
	Remove iBeacon profiles using the minus button
	If you lose some of the tutorial beacons, then reset the app iBeacon profiles using the reset button

Fire up Xcode and start a new project. Choose Single View Application from the iOS template menu as your project type.

A new project dialog

Set up your new project using the values shown in the following screenshot:

A new project options dialog

All of the features we need for this app to work are present in the Core Location framework.

Click on the project in the project navigator and scroll down to the Linked Frameworks and Libraries section of the General tab and then click on the add icon. We'll need to add the CoreLocation framework as shown in the following screenshot:

Adding the Core Location framework

We only really care about the LIViewController class for this tutorial as that's where we're going to be presenting to the user when we're moving in and out of regions. In order to do this, we need to add a reference to CoreLocation. Open LIViewController.h and add the following line just below the existing UIKit import:

#import <CoreLocation/CoreLocation.h>

Since iOS 8.0, you must specify a location description message in your plist settings. This is a nice friendly message for the users to help them understand why they need permission to use those location services. To do this, open the project file, click on your target Hello World, and then under the Info tab, add a new item to the dictionary under Custom iOS Target Properties with the following values:

Our ViewController instance is where all the action happens, so it makes sense for ViewController to be aware of location events. For that, we need to make it CLLocationManagerDelegate.

Go ahead and add the declaration to the LIViewController interface declaration. Change the interface declaration in LIViewController.h so that it looks like the following code:

@interface LIViewController : UIViewController<CLLocationManagerDelegate>

We also need to implement the CLLocationManagerDelegate methods so that we can show our notification when the device enters a region. Add the following code to the end of the LIViewController implementation in the LIViewController.m file:

-(void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didEnterRegion:(CLRegion *)region {
    UIAlertView * av = [[UIAlertView alloc] init];
    av.title = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Entered Region '%@'", region.identifier];
    [av addButtonWithTitle:@"OK"];
    [av show];
}

-(void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didExitRegion:(CLRegion *)region {
    UIAlertView * av = [[UIAlertView alloc] init];
    av.title = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Left Region '%@'", region.identifier];
    [av addButtonWithTitle:@"OK"];
    [av show];
}

Now, our view controller will be notified when a CLLocationManager instance receives events, but we don't have an instance of CLLocationManager yet. Add the following property to the LIViewController interface inside LIViewController.m:

@property (nonatomic, strong) CLLocationManager * locationManager;

For our app to know which region it's looking out for, we need some way of storing the UUID. Add the following line just below the implementation in LIViewController.m:

static NSString * uuid = @"EB9AB493-32C2-4E5C-BF67-76E86E338BB9";

Our app is already ready to start accepting location-based updates. All we need to do now is create a region, instantiate our location manager, and start monitoring our regions. Overwrite the viewDidLoad method of our LIViewController with the following code. We'll go through the most important code shortly.

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    NSUUID * regionUUID = [[NSUUID alloc] initWithUUIDString:uuid];
    
    CLBeaconRegion * region = [[CLBeaconRegion alloc] initWithProximityUUID:regionUUID identifier:@"My Region"];
    
    [region setNotifyOnEntry:YES];
    [region setNotifyOnExit:YES];
    self.locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init];
    self.locationManager.delegate = self;

    [self.locationManager requestAlwaysAuthorization];

    [self.locationManager startMonitoringForRegion:region];
}