ESCG Beacons

Overview

East Sussex College Group were looking to create a Bluetooth beacon app that alerts the user when they enter a new area of the college and uses an in-built browser to show off the department’s website.

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Technologies

Flutter

Android

iOS

Dart

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Case Study

Objective

Unusual Technologies created the app for iOS and Android using Flutter and Dart. The major challenge was getting the iOS version to run in the background of the user’s phone so it’s ‘awake’ to alert them when it detects a beacon – even when the phone is off. The most common solutions that many 3rd part apps, such as alarm clocks, seem to implement are also major battery drains.

The technologies

This project revolved around Bluetooth low-energy beacons. Using the Eddystone protocol, they work by transmitting packets of data containing a URL that is picked up by the app via radio waves. We then read the URL and display the corresponding website.

A physical BLE beacon

Our take

This was a fairly short project with difficult challenges to overcome. In the end we had developed a wide range of skills around Bluetooth and had the chance to delve into some more complex functionality that comes with developing mobile applications.