Is it possible to discover Gimbal beacons with standard iOS libraries

Question

I’m trying to determine about “discovering” Gimbal beacons with standard iOS libraries. According to Radius Networks and Blue Sense Networks - Gimbal beacons do not broadcast standard iBeacon formatted protocol and thus cannot be discovered without using the Gimbal iOS SDK.

"Gimbal beacons on the other hand broadcast a rolling encrypted code to ensure only users with the correct privileges can see the beacon's information. Basically this means that every time a Gimbal beacon emits a signal, it contains different data. Furthermore, any BLE enabled smartphone can see the Gimbal beacon advertisements, but since they change on every broadcast essentially this means the smartphone will detect the same physical beacon multiple times and will consider each detection a different device. So in order to properly use a Gimbal beacon a developer has no other choice but to do it through their proprietary SDK." - Blue Sense Networks

I've seen some conflicting statements about accessing these beacons but I havent seen any concrete examples. Is it possible? Are there any?

Answer 1

You can make the gimbal beacons discoverable as if it was an iBeacon. @james frost had the answer in his comment. Check out this post https://stackoverflow.com/a/22666967/1496517 I just did it and it works like a charm.

I wasn't able to see them with the estimote demo app but I was with the radius networks demo app. (probably because I didn't set the appropriate uuid)

Doing it this way will also let you get around the issue that gimbal has not released proximity on android, but you can use the radius network demo if you needed to.

You can also still seem them as a gimbal beacon as well as an iBeacon with the gimbal management app.