Getting started with Estimote? Want to dive straight into coding and build your first app? Then check out these third-party resources, which will help you hop on board the contextual computing era.
Psst … Make sure to check out the Estimote Developer Portal, which full of tutorials and in-depth resources.
Slack integrations
Apps below have been submitted to Estimote RealityHack Challenge #3: Reinvent the Workplace
| Note.cntxt by Donnie Propst and Adam Stone | With Note.cntxt, you can send people notes via Slack anytime without pushing them to work overtime. They will only receive the message when in range of the Estimote Beacon at their desk. Neat, huh? |
| Help Desk by Romin Irani | Printers and coffee machines: two devices that are essential to every office… and are also what nightmares are made of, when it comes to maintenance. Help Desk app lets you quickly report issues with workplace equipment to your Slack team, based on proximity to Estimote Beacons. |
| SlackBooking Richard Doyle and Francois Delpech | Room booking and availability is an idea that came up often among RealityHackers. Richard and Francois built a smart little app that handles this well. You can equip rooms with beacons and then check whether they’re occupied through Slack. |
| PreSense by Chay Choong, Chng Wei Sheng, Huang Jing Jie, and Joel Ang | This one was designed for large, multi-story offices but what we love about PreSense is that it can also come in handy for teams working remotely. It lets you toggle your status between available, busy, and not present. Thanks to Estimote Beacons, presence is updated automatically and each team member’s status can be looked up in Slack |
| SlackStatus by Paweł Brągoszewski | SlackStatus is another app designed to help distributed teams keep track team members' status. The app is sleek and uses Estimote Beacons to detect when you arrive at your desk. And the #status channel on Slack is a helpful feed of team activity. |
General tutorials
| Estimote iBeacon tutorial | A quick video from Mike Kane explaining the basics behind building apps with Estimote and iBeacon. |
| Understanding and Using iBeacons | A great, in-depth tutorial to start working with Estimote Beacons from Code Magazine. Read here. |
| Playing with iBeacons on iOS: a guide | Sidney de Koning explains his first steps using Estimote Beacons with iOS and JSON backend. Read all about it on his blog. |
| iBeacon Development Tutorial | Appcoda has published a pretty handy introduction to iOS development with iBeacons. You can find it right here. |
| ESTCompanion | A set of tools from Jonathon Hibbard to make building stuff with Beacons easier. Find it here. |
| PhoneGap Tutorial | A great tutorial created by Evothings. |
Swift
| Swift tutorial with iBeacon: Beginner's Guide | Step-by-step instructions on how to start with Estimote Beacons and Swift, published by CityOS. |
| Estimote Indoor Location Tutorial (Swift) | Mike Kane released a video, explaining how to build apps with Estimote Indoor Location SDK using Swift. |
| Developing iBeacon apps with Swift | An in-depth introduction to building iBeacon apps using Swift by Appcoda. Complete project available here. |
| Estimote and Swift | Our senior software engineer, Marcin Klimek, has prepared a short tutorial on how to create compatible with Estimote Beacons using the new programming language - Swift. |
| A Swift Tutorial | Will Dages walks you through a simple process of creating an app in Swift that changes the color of the screen as you approach a specific beacon. Full code is here. |
| Two-way iBeacon Communication with Swift | Fantastic tutorial from PubNub on how to start building iBeacon apps with Swift. Read on their blog. |
| Beacon App Development using Swift and Bluetooth LE | Short introduction to Swift development with Estimote Beacons and JSON backend from 3Pillar Global. |
| Swift Foundations for iBeacon technology | Make and Build's Gabe Arronte prepared a short introduction to building iBeacon-compatible apps with Swift. |
| Triangulator | An example by Nicolas Flacco for triangulation with beacons using the new Swift language. Available on GitHub. |
| Region Monitoring | Another simple app from Nicolas Flacco, showing how to do region monitoring in Swift. Find it here. |
Other components
| PyBeacon | A little library that lets you scan for Eddystone-URL with Python. |
| NativeScript | Mehfuz Hossain has created a NativeScript plugin for Estimote Beacons. Find it on GitHub. |
| Unity 3D asset | Kaasa Games has developed a Unity 3D plugin with iBeacon support. You can download it from the Unity asset store. |
| How to prototype beacons apps with Estimote and Evothings | Introduction to writing iBeacon apps with JavaScript and Evothings by Patrick Catanzariti. |
| Support iBeacon in Ionic framework app | Nic Raboy does a great job of explaining how to use beacons with an app based on Ionic framework. Read the tutorial. |
| Introduction to Google Eddystone | David Gonzalez explains the basics of building Eddystone apps on Android on his blog. |
| Eddystone and Google's Proximity API | Joe Birch dives into Google's new Proximity API. Read here. |
| Indoor location with Android | Try trilateration with this open source Android demo. |
| React-Native-iBeacon | Now you can also work with beacons using React Native. All thanks to Johannes Stein. Read here. |
| Oracle MAF | Oracle prepared an in-depth overview for people looking to utilize iBeacon with their Mobile Application Framework. Read here. |
| Google Analytics and Fosbury | Bart Persoons from Blue Mango offers good advice on how to hook up Google Analytcis, iBeacon, and the Fosbury platform. |
| Raspberry Pi | Make and Build hooked up beacons with Raspberry Pi and Amazon Web Services. Read more on their blog. |
| JavaScript | Amazing tutorial for building iBeacon apps with JavaScript using EvoThings and Estimote.Read on our blog. |
| Mobstac: Teddy | Cute teddy bear app from Param Aggarwal, built with Mobstac platform and Estimote Beacons. Find the code on GitHub. |
| iBeaconAndroidDemo | A simple tutorial for starting with beacons and Android by Florian Muller. |
| Xamarin plugin | Xamarin plugin for Estimote SDK by Allan Ritchie. Available on GitHub. |
| Xamarin and Android SDK | Tom Opgenorth from Xamarin has built a component for our Android SDK. It’s available on Xamarin.com. |
| Xamarin and iOS SDK | Xamarin works perfectly with both iBeacon and nearables. Read about it here. |
| Xamarin: create your own scavenger hunt | Xamarin open-sourced Evolve Quest, their iBeacon scavenger hunt app used at Xamarin Evlove conference. Code is on GitHub. |
| PhoneGap | You can also find an unofficial PhoneGap plugin by Konrad Dzwinel which is now maintained by EvoThings (GitHub). There's also this Cordova plugin. |
| Titanium Appcelerator | Great iBeacon plugin for Titanium Appcelerator users. |
| Quick guide to writing mobile iBeacon Applications in JavaScript | Find out about Evothings Studio and how it makes writing iBeacon apps with JavaScript and HTML possible in this tutorial. |
| Rails backend for your Estimote app | Quick tutorial from Syntax Error explaining how to hook up your Estimote app with Rails backend. |
| Android Monitoring Example | Yoann Diguet explains how to perform monitoring and create notifications on Android. |
| Estimote Beacons for web developers | Sample integration of Estimote Beacons with Socket.io by Benchmark. The code is on GitHub. |
Cool hacks
| Simple beacon CMS | Untitled Kingdom has built a simple beacon CMS integrated with Estimote. It's available right here. |
| DingDong iBeacons | Digital doorbell built with Estimote Beacons and Cloudilly. Check the repo on GitHub. |
| Open Sesame | Skookum team explains how they used Estimote Beacons to automate their office door. |
| Sniffur | Red Pepper's Matt Reed explains how he finds his dog in the office with beacons and Raspberry Pi. |
| Arrived | A cool hack by Azam Sharp that lets you track your belongings with beacons. |
| Proximizer | With Estimote Android SDK, Wolfgang Werner has put together a sample app changing color based on beacon proximity. Check Proximizer out. |
| Build Beacon-Enabled Apps in a Few Hours | Check the best projects from Mobstac's beacon hackday on their blog. |
| Adding Real World Context to Mobile Apps with Beacons | Fantastic work by Jen Looper, explaining how to mix beacons, Cordova and a barcode scanner into an app. Code is on GitHub. |
| Getting to Grips with Google Glass and iBeacon | Great post from the TMW agency on building an app for GoogleGlass with iBeacon support. The Glasstimote repo is available here. |
| PunchClock: Fun with iBeacons | Panic designed a very cool in/out office tracker using beacons and JSON backend. It's described here and repo with code is on GitHub. |
| Time-control app using iBeacons and the IBM MobileData Service | Step by step instruction on how to build a simple app with Estimote Android SDK and integrate it with IBM MobileData. Look it up on IBM's website. |
| Cat Live Position Tracker | Cat tracking system by Jon Bennett built with Spark and Estimote Beacons. Full description with code here. |
| Office Radar | Mashup between Estimote SDK and Couchbase Mobile to monitor people around the office. Find the complete code on GitHub. |
| Estimopener | Code snippets and tutorial by Jonathan Burris for creating a gatekeeper app for your garage door. Check the video here and code here. |
| Treasure Hunt | Craig Gilchrist from the Eden Agency has built a nice demo for a treasure hunt app. His tutorial for building with iBeacons can be found here while the complete code is here. |
| iHotWarmCold | Exemplary app from Karl Nosworthy based on proximity capabilities of the Beacons. Available on GitHub. |
| Public transport for visually impaired | Back in February, a team working with Estimote Beacons won the local Hack4Good hackathon. Their app was designed to help visually impaired people in their daily commute. Check out the repos of their prototype right here. |
| LIFX smart lights integration | Ever wondered how you can make LIFX or Hue smart lights compatible with Estimote Beacons? Check the code and tutorial from Mark Denford. |
| HueBeacons | There's more on Hue integration! Yazid Azhari has published his project on GitHub - why not check it out? |
Implementation advice
For advice on installing and deploying beacons, read: