SWRA475A January   2015  – October 2016 CC2540 , CC2540T , CC2541 , CC2541-Q1

 

  1.   Bluetooth low energy Beacons
    1.     Trademarks
    2. 1 What is a Beacon?
    3. 2 Bluetooth low energy and Bluetooth Smart
      1. 2.1 Non-Connectable Beacons
      2. 2.2 Connectable Beacons
      3. 2.3 Data Packet
      4. 2.4 Device Address
        1. 2.4.1 Flags
        2. 2.4.2 Manufacturer Specific Data
      5. 2.5 Broadcast Interval
      6. 2.6 Power
      7. 2.7 Range
      8. 2.8 Coexistence
    4. 3 Designing a Bluetooth low energy Beacon
      1. 3.1 Development Kits
      2. 3.2 Creating a Beacon Application With TI Bluetooth low energy-Stack
    5. 4 iBeacon Implementation
      1. 4.1 Overview and Prerequisites
      2. 4.2 Design and Implementation
      3. 4.3 Testing
    6. 5 Proprietary Implementation
      1. 5.1 Overview and Prerequisites
      2. 5.2 Design and Implementation
      3. 5.3 Testing
    7. 6 References
  2.   Revision History

2.4.2 Manufacturer Specific Data

When using Manufacturer-Specific Data, the 0xFF flag is used to indicate so. The first two bytes of the data itself should be a company identifier code.

Table 4. Advertisement Data Types, Manufacturer Specific Data Format

Byte Value Description
0 0x03-0x1F Length of this data
1 0xFF Manufacturer-Specific Data Flag
2 0x0D Company ID
3 0x00 (Example, 0x000D – Texas Instruments)
4 - 31 - User Defined Data (optional)

The Bluetooth low energy packet format allows a device to broadcast 25 Bytes of Manufacturer-Specific Data if the advertisement is of the type Connectable undirected advertising (ADV_IND) or Scannable undirected advertising event (ADV_SCAN_IND) as Discoverable Mode flags are required. For non-connectable undirected advertising (ADV_NONCONN_IND) maximum length of the Manufacturer-Specific Data is 28 bytes. The Manufacturer-Specific Data can contain any user-defined information.

The broadcasted data can also be formatted in a standardized way. At the time of writing this application report there are a couple of standards, such as iBeacon from Apple and AltBeacon, from Radius Networks. iBeacon is protected by the MFi license and is interoperable with all iOS devices. AltBeacon is an open standard and the specification can be downloaded at http://altbeacon.org/. This application note describes how to use the TI Bluetooth low energy stack for an iBeacon. Eddystone, from Google, is an open source beacon standard, and is covered in an application note on the Bluetooth low energy wiki page.