Beacon

A beacon is the simplest useful Bluetooth Low Energy device: it wakes at a fixed interval, broadcasts a short advertisement containing an identifier and optionally a few sensor values, then sleeps. It never connects to anything, which keeps firmware simple and lets a coin cell last for years. Apple’s iBeacon and Google’s Eddystone defined the common packet formats; many industrial vendors use their own.

Beacons work in two directions. In the consumer pattern, fixed beacons in a store or museum let an app on a visitor’s phone know where it is. In the asset tracking pattern, beacons ride on tools, pallets or hospital equipment, and fixed gateways listen for them to report location. Proximity from signal strength is approximate, so room-level accuracy is realistic and meter-level needs extra techniques such as direction finding or UWB.

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