Indigo Plugin: Beacon

I wrote Beacon to be able to use iBeacons in my home automation setup. It seemed to me that the easiest way to do that was to use one of the existing iBeacon compatible apps and interface it with Indigo. I’d been playing around with Geohopper (which, added bonus, supports geofencing as well as iBeacons) and Beecon and since I felt that they had different pros and cons I decided to build the plugin for both. In the latest version I also added support for Geofancy.

Geohopper has built in support for web services (in-app purchase) and can be configured to HTTP POST a JSON-formatted event when entering or exiting a region. The post originates from a central location, not from the app itself, which means that the plugin needs to be accessible from the Internet for it to work. This means opening the firewall for the configured port and allow traffic to the Indigo server. The TCP port can be selected from the plugin configuration screen. The URL to use in the Geohopper app should look like this: https://[Indigo server FQDN or IP]:[port number].

Examples: https://home.example.com:6192, or https://1.2.3.4:6192 where 1.2.3.4 is your external (public) IP-address.

Beecon can be used ether over the Internet or over a local LAN, so if sending events over the Internet isn’t needed the Indigo server doesn’t need to be exposed. In Beecon you need to format the URL yourself to get it to work with the plugin, according to this spec: https://[Indigo server FQDN or IP]:[port number]/?sender=[sender_name]&location=[location_name]&event=[event] where event can be either LocationEnter, LocationExit or LocationTest.

Examples: https://home.example.com:6192/?sender=email\@example.com&location=home&event=LocationEnter, or https://1.2.3.4:6192/?sender=MyName&location=garage&event=LocationExit

Geofancy uses HTTP PUT or HTTP GET to send www-form-urlencoded updates. (More info on the Geofancy Wiki.) The Geofancy app needs to be configured to use https://your-server:port and can be used on a local LAN or over the Internet.

The original author of this plugin is no longer actively maintaining it. With his permission, we’ve forked his repository into our open source repo, bumped the version number, and added it to the plugin store. We will not be maintaining this plugin, but anyone who is interested in making updates is more than welcome to do so. We’ll accept any pull requests after a cursory code review just to make sure the change doesn’t do anything malicious.

If you are interested in taking over maintenance, please let us know and we’ll gladly give you direct management permissions.

Indigo Domotics doesn't guarantee that this plugin works. We are only hosting the project here in our open source repository for Indigo plugins.