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bluetoothbluetooth-lowenergyandroid-bluetoothios-bluetooth

Feasibility of BlueTooth Reader and App Project

I'm working on a project to track delivery trucks leaving and returning to the office.

While I know RFID would work, we're also looking at BlueTooth with mobile apps. Ideally, once a driver installs the app, we register a unique ID for the device, and a BT reader identifies when phones/deliveries leave and enter range without any user interaction.

From the Android 6.0 release notes, it looks like the MAC address is hidden from apps and BT broadcasting. https://developer.android.com/about/versions/marshmallow/android-6.0-changes#behavior-hardware-id

User management of app installs and enabling BT aside, is this feasible?

Can someone point me in the right direction to confirm what identifiers are available?

Solution

  • When I understand you correctly you actually do not want to track where a phone is but want to know if a person/truck/phone passes a kind of checkpoint or gate?

    For newer smart phones you cannot rely on the visible MAC. Bluetooth classic is usually not visible and the BLE MAC is randomized as long as the device is not paired and bonded.

    Indeed as PaulW11 stated, the simple way would be to implement an app which does BLE advertising with short advertising interval. Inside this advertisment you can put some custom data. This will be visible to everyone. This ID can be some random number, a number assigned by you or whatever.

    At the gate you would implement a BLE scanner grabbing all advertisments near to it.

    This should be easy to implement.

    I would also like to mention the drawbacks here: If someone passes the gate you may miss him. BLE with Android is always tricky and you might have the situation that the bluetooth subsystem on a phone may have stopped working or so.

    One the other hand if someone comes accidently near to your gate, you will think he left or returned. Near can be something around 50 m or so with good conditions or only 10 in other cases.

    And even worse: If someone stays 'nearly' in the range of the gate you will see im sporadically. This may confuse your come and go logic if he is visible every 3 minutes or so...