Developing Eddystones App In Android

Eddystone beacons is google's answer to Apple's Ibeacon. Both devices use BLE technology but differ in advertising protocols.

Ibeacons transmit a single frame wherein the Ibeacon identifier bytes is at the 8th and 9th byte of the frame. See picture below as seen on Ibeacon Detector app on android:

And a more detailed data structure of the frame is below:

In comparison, Eddystones transmit 3 frames which is like below:

As an evidence, if you use Ibeacon Detector App to detect the Eddystones, you will notice that the data packets received always changes that is because eddystones transmit 3 frames.

I have previously developed an android app to scan ibeacons (A Simple Ibeacon Scanner App in Android) and this app can be slightly modified to scan for eddystones as well by removing the validation that look for "0215" pattern in the frame and look for valid values to identify the frame type as described in the last picture.

A lot of people ask, why do we need eddystones since we already have ibeacons? The answer is obvious, eddystones is able to transmit more data than ibeacons. Ibeacon frame contain only the RSSI, UUID, Majo and Minor. The latter 3 is used to identify the ibeacon, while the eddystones frames contain the TX power, Temperature, URL, Battery Charge Level, Instance Id, Namespace Id, and many more.