Just grabbed an iBeacon, what should I try with it?

Picked one up a few days ago as a toy. Anyone have anything simple and cool to try with it? Ideally Shortcuts related? Thanks in advance!

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have you listened to Automators 38: Simon Leeb and Pushcut? there are a few examples in there in combination with Pushcut.

one thing I find useful is a get-out-of-here notification “at 9 pm when I am in the office” - where office is actually an iBeacon.

another fun thing are reminders to open an app when you get to an iBeacon/location (say a McDonalds :wink: )

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I got part way through, I’ll give it another listen, thanks!

I seem to remember @MacSparky saying we should do an episode on iBeacons… :innocent: :crystal_ball:

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One topic for discussion: “Can iBeacons be used to have something happen when you leave an area with an iBeacon?” I’m thinking about the scenario a Shortcut run when you leave your office or a room or some such to turn off lights, etc.

Pushcut and Launch Center Pro both support this.

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My car does not have Bluetooth, so I have a USB plug-in iBeacon in the car that uses Pushcut, some Shortcuts and Data Jar (beta) to set up my phone for the drive (DND on, Apple Maps with destination, entertainment: Overcast, Audible (only opens the app, I have to press play!), Apple Music). At the end of the trip, the same persistent notification from Pushcut can stop the audio and turn off DND.

Another option is when “leaving” the iBeacon that it can fire the end of journey notification, which also allows me to save my car’s location, some notes and a photo to Data Jar so that I can use that information and fire off Apple Maps to locate it later.

Everything could be done just using more menu options in Shorcuts or Pushcut, but Data Jar allows me to record if I am the start or end of a journey so Shortcuts can figure out whether to fire things up, or turn them off.

I’m just playing around with ideas for the moment and refining the options. It’s all rather rough, but I like the basics.

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That would be awesome. :slight_smile:

My first one was an iBeacon in my car. Pushcut shows me a list of items, depending on why I got into the car.

  • Open and Play Overcast (with car Bluetooth broken this is handy)
  • Going Home - runs shortcut: Get current location > sends a text to my wife with ETA > Open Waze and navigate home
  • Shortcut to play fav playlist in Music

The other beacons I use with our clients, here I am an still working through the kinks. But basically, every time I walk into a client site. In the range of iBeacon, Pushcut uses a webhook to capture my arrival. And when I leave the range of the iBeacon Pushcut runs again in the background to log my departure time.
Still working through issues, getting the webhook to work every time, been getting errors now and then. Then the second issue is which most iBeacon users will have is to get the signal just right to not getting too many triggers running!

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