What would it take to turn an Android mini PC and a Bluetooth dongle into an iBeacon?

Question

When I connect the dongle to the Android mini PC it's obviously not going to be able to function as an iBeacon(and by iBeacon here I mean the actual hub that enables nearby devices to communicate) right away. What do I have to do to turn it into an iBeacon? Is there some library I can easily install? Or do I have to do something crazy like reverse engineer the "iBeacon protocol"?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Android devices cannot act as iBeacons without heavy low-level modifications. See here.

The answer above is for Android phones, but the same obstacles apply to a mini PC. Connecting an external Bluetooth dongle is just the first challenge. You would then need to overcome these hurdles:

1. Root the device
2. Write and install a driver for the Bluetooth dongle
3. Install AOSP custom ROM to enable Peripheral mode support.
4. Write code to make the device send out the standard BLE iBeacon advertisement.

This is probably way more than you want to bite off!

Answer 2

There isn't really an "iBeacon protocol" - iBeacon is just a standard BLE advertisement packet with a known UUID (identifying it as the iBeacon service). It also is not a communication channel - as in centrals do not exchange information with the peripheral doing the advertising. See this answer for a really good breakdown of the packet you need to send to mimic iBeacon.

To answer your question - there are BLE dongles (like the Bluegiga BLED 112) that allow you to flash the BLE service onto the dongle, so it may just requires power from the host to begin advertising the service. I haven't tried this, but this kind of flashable BLE dongle seems like your easiest route - though the host being Android is rather irrelevant at that stage.