Eddystone™ is a new beacon format introduced Google, developers making beacon-enabled apps now have more options than ever. If you're looking to build a new beacon-enabled app, or if you already have beacon apps, it's important to understand what Eddystone can do. 

The Eddystone specification defines multiple beacon advertisement PDU's, each with it's own special purpose. The Eddystone PDU's include the following: 

Eddystone-UID 

This is the primary advertisement PDU and consists of a two part identifier (10 bytes for the namespace and 6 bytes for the instance) as well as a one-byte transmitter power calibration value, which is used for distance estimates. 

Eddystone-TLM

This PDU contains telemetry information including the packet version (always a one-byte value of 0 for now), the beacon temperature (2 bytes), the beacon battery level (2 bytes), the number of seconds the beacon has been powered (2 bytes) and the number of “PDU” packet transmissions the beacon has sent (2 bytes.) 

Eddystone-URL

This PDU is an alternative transmission to the Eddystone-UID that sends out a compressed 17 byte URL instead of a numeric identifier. The idea is that an app detecting the beacon can go directly to this URL without the app having to convert a beacon numeric identifier to destination web address. This Eddystone frame is the new replacement for the existing URI Beacon, an open standard also introduced previously by Google. 

If you would like to learn more about Eddystone, check out our Introducing Eddystone blog post.