Just wrapped up the first iOSCon hackathon and had a blast tinkering with my Raspberry Pi, turning it into a full-fledged Bluetooth device in sync with an iPhone app. Used node for setting up and Bleno for creating Bluetooth low energy peripherals. Penned down each step for you to replicate, right from writing strings on my LCD to reading temperatures and getting notified of IR remote button clicks. Ran it on an app store or GitHub test application. Also, explored the Core Bluetooth framework for iOS app creation, for reading and writing data to the Raspberry Pi. Let's keep creating...
In today's blog post, I successfully turned my Raspberry Pi into an iBeacon using a Bluetooth dongle and following an Adafruit tutorial. I had to go under the hood a bit to make sure my dongle was recognized, but after adding some udev rules, it was good to go. Then, with a string of terminal commands, I was able to set it up as an iBeacon broadcasting a specific UUID. Testing it out with a basic iOS app, I was able to detect the signal strength from the beacon! While it wasn't the flashiest project, it was definitely satisfying to...