TampereJS talk on how to read physical web beacons with nodejs.

1. Public Physical Web
Display with Nodejs
Jouni Ojala

2. Interaction
technique
concept for public
space

3. A chance to reclaim public space?

4. Changing this
Making it digital and
scaling down to micro
level

5. to be
accessible for
everyone
Micro advertisement in for
people and businesses

6. Physical Web

8. Physical Web: Beacons
Several BLE beacons available but
the easiest solution is to make a
beacon in Beacon Toy on your
Android phone

9. Physical Web: Receiving
Typical beacons use BLE / Bluetooth
4.0. Newest Androids have the
Nearby software which reads several
beacon types.
Some webkit browsers can also read
eddystone url-beacons

10. Javascript
implementation

11. Components
nodejs
nginx
Bluetooth-hci-socket
ble-beacon-reader
restler
Cheerio
Jsonfile
json to html-frontend
JQuery
Vue.js

12. Structure
BLE hardware
Bluetooth-hci-
socket
nodejs
Bluetooth-
beacon-reader
restler
target url
cheerio
json
frontend
Vuejs

13. Process and
challenges

14. Initial testing
Initial testing was done
on an ARM computer, with
wifi and BLE.

15. Reading the beacons turned out to be very easy.
Until I managed to destroy my development platform and
replacements were not in stock.

16. Figuring out
how to get the
title
Getting the page and
reading the title was
challenging due to lack of
knowledge and skill.
Solution was found from a
TampereJS presentation!
Wikipedia game by Antti

17. Setting up a
new dev-
environment
Still missing a BLE
device.
Bought a BLE dongle, which
works like a charm, even
on a virtual machine.

18. Make a simple dynamic fronted in
Vue.js and add some CSS-candy.