Added Beacon Monitoring.

[YarnoVdW]

Added beacon monitoring so that we can scan for beacons close in range to iOS devices in the background.

[bardram]

I will pull this into a separate branch on the CAMS repo so I can improve on the code and docs.

[bardram]

Hi @YarnoVdW - I'm looking at the PR now and have some questions...

The main question is why the beacon scanning is part of the Bluetooth measure? Why don't we make a separate measure called beacon with its own configuration, date model, and probe? Then people can choose if they want to use BLE scanning or Beacon scanning, or both.

As it is implemented now, people have to choose between the two using the useBeaconMonitoring flag.

So - my question is - is there any problem in separating this into two measures, and hence data streams? What is the use case for you? And - are there any technical issues to consider? Can't you scan for BLE devices and beacons at the same time?

[bardram]

As it is implemented now, people have to choose between the two using the useBeaconMonitoring flag.

https://github.com/cph-cachet/carp.sensing-flutter/blob/e89dd3916e4087c1799c924a2a0b5e1b937cb833/packages/carp_connectivity_package/lib/connectivity_probes.dart#L104-L118

[bardram]

The other problem is that you're forcing the "old" BLE data model to this beacon data model and mapping almost everything to the beacon name.

https://github.com/cph-cachet/carp.sensing-flutter/blob/e89dd3916e4087c1799c924a2a0b5e1b937cb833/packages/carp_connectivity_package/lib/connectivity_data.dart#L165-L173

IMO it would be better to have a dedicated data class for beacons.

[bardram]

@YarnoVdW - if you agree, I can pretty easily fix this by just reshuffling your code. But before doing this, I need to make sure that I understand your use case for this.

[YarnoVdW]

@bardram I'll update the code so that you do not have to spend time doing :) It is indeed better to have a dedicated class for the beacon scanning. Our use case is for iOS especially, since iOS does not allow bluetooth scanning while the app is in the background, using iBeacon ranging, we can have our app fully in the background while it is ranging for iBeacons.

[bardram]

Ok. If you can update it that's fine. Ping me when I can review and merge a pull request.