There’s multiple uses for beacons, if you own your own shop you can use a beacon to give special offers, and maybe even vouchers. Small independent art galleries could use beacons to interact with guests to show them a snippet of video on each piece. By using the BBC micro:bit you can easily create your own for not so much money!

Plug in your BBC micro:bit, and head over to Espruino and download the latest micro:bit hex file, or download 1v95 below.

Drag and drop it on your micro:bit to install it.

Next pick yourself up the mbed driver and install it. Next in Chome you need to use Espruino.

Once opened click the little plug icons in the top right and select mbed Serial Port.

You can use this Eddystone URL Generator to direct to your own URL.  Make sure you also shorten your chosen URL too! You can use goo.gl. Here’s mine below using -5 Tx power. Paste your code between eddyStoneData = [ and ];

eddyStoneData = [
 0x03, // Length of Service List
 0x03, // Param: Service List
 0xAA, 0xFE, // Eddystone ID
 0x13, // Length of Service Data
 0x16, // Service Data
 0xAA, 0xFE, // Eddystone ID
 0x10, // Frame type: URL
 0xFB, // Power
 0x03, // https://
 'g',
 'o',
 'o',
 '.',
 'g',
 'l',
 '/',
 'r',
 'W',
 '5',
 'g',
 'U',
 'o',
 ];

NRF.setAdvertising(eddyStoneData, {interval:100});

Click the upload button (in the middle, the chip with the arrow) and you should be done! Check your phone and you should receive a notification like this:

Stuck? Have a question? Feel free to contact me either using the comments below or @imwestm on Twitter.