A sub-project of a sub-project. I needed to better understand BLE Beacons and how beaconDB uses them.
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What on earth is beaconDB?
I've been using GrapheneOS for about half a year now. Back in March they added support for network based location.[^0] This means you no longer need to rely on Google's location services. Looking into how the system works sent me down yet another rabbit hole of reading.
Anyways, in 2013 Mozilla launched Mozilla Location Service (MLS) as a pilot project to provide location lookup using observations of public cell towers, BLE Beacons and WiFi access points. Sadly, in 2024 Mozilla retired MLS. Thankfully, beaconDB launched to continue the work!
I have been hacking away on a project for contributing observations to beaconDB and I wanted some BLE beacons I could use for testing. This experiment sort of spun off from that work.
The plan is simple:
Buy some BLE beacons.
Get their MAC addresses.
Query the beaconDB API to confirm no location is currently associated with the beacons.
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