Proxitee | Using proxitee without a physical beacon - Proxitee


Using proxitee without a physical beacon

When developing iOS apps that use proxitee one of the first hurdles a developer may come across is not having a physical beacon on hand to test with, in this post I want to demonstrate how you can instead use an iOS 7 upwards device (supporting BLE) to transmit as a beacon to help test different scenarios and to also to avoid using up the battery life of your physical beacons.


The first step is downloading an app that supports transmitting as a beacon for the transmitting device, I have found a simple one to get running is Beacon Broadcaster so once this is installed perform the following:


  1. Enable bluetooth on the device
  2. Start the Beacon Broadcaster app
  3. Edit UUID, Major and Minor values and make a note of the selected values
  4. Give the beacon a name
  5. Choose done from the toolbar
  6. Press the central button and it should turn blue and pulsate


This will now put the device into transmitting mode, next is to configure the proxitee cloud administration site so that it uses the same values that were setup above. Sign into the proxitee cloud administration site then perform the following:


  1. Navigate to the Organisation screen and edit the UUID so that it matches the one selected from the previous setup steps and save.
  2. Then if you haven’t already done so setup a Beacon then edit using the Major and Minor values from the previous setup steps and save.


Now you can use the device your developing on to setup the app to use the proxitee sdk, in the AppDelegate setup the PXTProxitee class, then register for the kPXTBeaconManagerDidReceiveBeaconsNotification from the notifications property and start the beacons. Now if you run the app it should now pickup the transmitting device and you should see it appear inside the beacons array.


This is an example of the code that you should use for the AppDelegate:


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