Testing out BLE beacons with BeaconDB

Summary

What on earth is beaconDB? I've been using GrapheneOS for about half a year now. Back in March they added support for network based location.[^0] This means you no longer need to rely on Google's location services. Looking into how the system works sent me down yet another rabbit hole of reading. Anyways, in 2013 Mozilla launched Mozilla Location Service (MLS) as a pilot project to provide location lookup using observations of public cell towers, BLE Beacons and WiFi access points. Sadly, in 2024 Mozilla retired MLS. Thankfully, beaconDB launched to continue the work! I have been hacking away on a project for contributing observations to beaconDB and I wanted some BLE beacons I could use for testing. This experiment sort of spun off from that work. The plan is simple: Buy some BLE beacons. Get their MAC addresses. Query the beaconDB API to confirm no location is currently associated with the beacons. Place the beacons in my yard. Take my dog on a walk around the block while running NeoStumbler. Re-run the API query to see location estimates. What on earth are BLE Beacons? I've been writing the phrase BLE beacons a lot without describing what they are. So to disambiguate : Bluetooth - a wireless communication standard. Bluetooth Low Energy - part of the Bluetooth 4.0 protocol, much lower power consumption, but also reduced transmission rates. BLE beacons - BLE devices that are primarily transmit only. Stationary BLE beacons are often used to mark locations in places where GPS signals are weak, like inside malls. Also, there is no single BLE beacon standard. Instead we have: iBeacon which was released by Apple in 2013. Apple generally still supports them. In 2014 Google launched the experimental URIBeacon. Then in 2015 Google replaced that with Eddystone. A one point Google was really into the concept of the Physical Web, but thankfully gave up on spamming users with notifications in 2018. This effectively reduced Google's involvement with the standard. Eddystone also...