The following guide is suitable for this beacon only (BC04P):
Thanks for ordering one of our products, and welcome to the fascinating world of iBeacons!
Note: If you have any questions about any of the following instructions, please feel free to CONTACT us any time. We are here to answer your questions or help in any way. Almost all emails are answered by senior support staff within hours. If you don’t receive an answer, check your spam folder.
99.3% of the problems that beginners have with beacons are just a simple misunderstanding of one of the concepts. Admittedly, the world of beacons is a bit confusing with all of the TX, interval, broadcast, UUID…technical words. In other words, don’t feel bad at all if you are a little confused at first. I tried to make it as clear as possible in the instructions below, but that requires lots of words, which sometimes can be a bit boring to read when you are excited about a new beacon you just received!
Another note: Before we do anything, it should be noted that you can use your beacon straight out of the box just by turning it on (see “turn ON the beacon” below). There is no absolute requirement to change the configuration settings.
This is very good advice for HomeAssistant users too. For your first beacon setup, just turn the beacon on. That’s it. Don’t try to adjust any settings until you have HA or the ESP working properly. If it’s not working, make adjustments on the HA or ESP first to try to solve the problem. The beacon is very rarely the source of the problem.
If you ever want to confirm that your beacon is working, use our KBeaconPro app to scan for it. If you see it on the scan screen, it’s working.
One final note: This beacon is capable of broadcasting a PHY broadcast. This is a newer protocol. Warning: Do not set the beacon to PHY unless you are 100% sure that your smartphone is PHY capable. Currently there are zero phones on the market that are PHY capable. Keep in mind that if you set the beacon to a PHY broadcast only, but you don’t have a PHY-capable smartphone, you won’t be able to see the beacon appear on the scan screen at all. If you do happen to make this mistake, just open the beacon up and click the button once; that will start a legacy broadcast for 30 seconds that will allow the beacon to appear on the app scan screen. You can then connect to it and change the broadcast type back to the standard “Legacy” broadcast that all phones can scan.
Turn ON the beacon
-Open the beacon housing by turning the upper portion counterclockwise to separate it from the lower portion.
-Inside the upper portion, you will see a small white rectangular shaped button.
-Turn on the beacon by pressing and holding down the button for 3 seconds until the LED light begins to flash red or blue, then release the button. The LED light is located on the same circuit board as the button. The red LED will flash slowly for 30 seconds indicating that the beacon is now ON and broadcasting. If the LED is blue, it will long flash once indicating that the beacon is now ON and broadcasting.
-Reassemble the upper and lower portions of the housing.
The beacon is now broadcasting with the following default settings:
Beacon Name: BCPro_(six digit number randomly assigned during production)
Advertising Interval: 1022.5
Advertising Flags: Connectable (Unconnectable status saves about 20% of the battery power, but makes working with the beacon a bit tricky at first. We would suggest you leave it as connectable for now.)
TX Power: 0 dBm
Measured Power: -59
Beacon Type: iBeacon
iBeacon UUID: 1B6295D5-4F74-4C58-A2D8-CD83CA26BDF4
iBeacon Major ID: 3838
iBeacon Minor ID: 4949
All you need to do now is to enter the above settings into your target app, scanner, home automation system, etc.
Update: On a recent production run of this beacon, we changed the default configuration to iBeacon, UID, and URL broadcasts BUT the UID and URL broadcasts are set to “trigger only adv” with no trigger assigned. So they will not broadcast unless you assign a trigger. You probably won’t need to use them, so in the end, this will have no effect on your regular SLOT0 iBeacon broadcast. In other words, the beacon default setting is broadcasting SLOT0 iBeacon only.
That’s it! 98.5% of the people using one beacon will not need to do anything else.
To turn OFF the beacon, press and hold down the internal button for 5 seconds until the LED light begins to flash red or blue, then release the button. The LED will flash 8 times quickly, indicating that the beacon is now OFF and no longer broadcasting.
A General Overview of the BC04P Beacon’s Features
Before we get into the configuration stuff, let’s do a quick review of the features of the BC04P:
The BC04P is capable of broadcasting several different types of broadcasts. The most commonly used type is standard iBeacon.
The BC04P has five different “slots” for broadcasting (slots are numbered 0 through 4). Most users will only use one slot, but if you wanted to, you could technically broadcast up to 5 different UUID numbers all with different configurations. That gets complicated quickly, plus it uses lots of battery power, so let’s leave that aside for now.
The BC04P has a motion trigger. You can set this up to only broadcast after sensing motion (like an alarm), or you can configure the beacon to broadcast normally but then to modify the broadcast UUID for a period of time after sensing motion. Sort of like having one beacon broadcasting during normal times, then a “second” beacon broadcasting after sensing motion.
The BC04P has the typical adjustable broadcast power levels (called “TX” in beaconese), but it also has a super weak level of -40 and a super strong level of +8. You can use these if you want the range of the beacon to be very short or very long.
You can adjust the frequency of the beacon broadcasts that are sent out by the beacon (called “interval” in beaconese). More frequent broadcasts are easier for scanners/smartphones to “see”, but that also uses more battery power. The default is one broadcast every 1022.5 milliseconds, i.e. one broadcast every 1.0225 seconds.
The BC04P also has some other quite technical “pro” features such as telemetry broadcasting (XYZ motion) and some other fancy stuff such as the most advanced “PHY Coded” broadcast method. For most users, this is a bit premature since there are no smartphones (yet) that can scan for PHY Coded broadcasts. But some BLE gateway scanners can do so. The main benefit of this feature is super long range. Keep in mind that if you set the beacon to PHY Coded broadcast only, but you don’t have a PHY coded capable smartphone, you won’t be able to scan for the beacon with your phone (i.e. it won’t show up again on the config app screen anymore since you phone can not “see” PHY coded broadcasts; if that happens, click the button once to make it scannable/connectable for 15 seconds, then connect and set it back to Legacy broadcast mode).
How to change the default configuration settings of the beacon
OK, so maybe you need to change one of the settings. For example, if you are using multiple beacons; you need to change the UUID just a little in order to make each beacon’s ID unique from the others in your collection. Follow the steps below to do that.
Step 1: Download the configuration app.
Scan the appropriate QR code below or search for KBeaconPro in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Be sure to search for KBeaconPro, NOT our other app which is called KBeacon. This is very important!
Android users should be sure to give the app Location permission AND also be sure that your Android smartphone’s Location Services are enabled. You can find these settings in your phone’s Settings menu, and typically in the Location sub menu (but of course, every brand of Android can be slightly different, so dig around in Settings until you find it).
Here’s a video that mirrors the instructions below. If you want to just watch the video only, that’s fine, but it would be better if you also read the instructions below to absorb some of the key points.
Step 2: Open the app
Once you have installed the app, open the app on your phone. Tap the SCAN button in the upper right hand corner to begin scanning for beacons:
Two things to remember on this step:
-The scan will last for a certain period of time and then stop after that time has elapsed. The beacons on the screen will not change after that. New beacons will not appear on the screen after that. The restart the scan, press the SCAN button again in the upper right corner of the screen.
-Once the screen has a list of nearby beacons, it may or may not update that list depending on the type of smartphone. To avoid this trap, swipe down on the app screen to refresh the results. If time has already elapsed, you will also need to tap SCAN again. Wait a few moments for the results to be shown.
Summary: Be sure to tap SCAN to restart the scan, and be sure to swipe down the screen to refresh the results. These two reminders will solve 92.3% of your problems if you can not seem to find the beacon on your screen results.
Quick tip: As you can see in the screenshots above, I have used the results filter function. Otherwise, if you have lots of BLE things around you (oddly enough, I do!), your beacon may appear far down the list and be easy to overlook. On the Android version screenshot, I filtered by the MAC address of my target beacon’s MAC: DD600300011B. On the iPhone version screenshot, I filtered by the last three digits of the name of my target beacon: 539. You can use either method. Your particular beacon’s MAC and name are printed on the sticker attached to the beacon.
RSSI figures: A quick word about RSSI figures: On the scan screen of the KBeaconPro app, you can see the live RSSI signal strength measurement of the beacon as measured by the smartphone. For example, in the iOS screenshot above, the RSSI is measured as -52dBm. A distant beacon will show on the app screen with a “low” (weak) RSSI. Since RSSI figures are all negative numbers, a low RSSI would be -90, for example. A higher RSSI figure would be -27, for example. The further away from zero, in the negative direction, indicates that the signal is weaker, and thus we can infer that the beacon is further away from your phone.
iPhones don’t show UUID: Sharp-eyed readers might notice that the above screenshots have a difference on iPhone vs Android. iPhone’s don’t like to display the UUID for some strange reason. They can “see” it and react to it, but they don’t like to show it on an app scan screen. iPhones will gladly show the Major and Minor, so we can see those two numbers on the iPhone screenshot above (3838 and 4949). The Android screenshot, on the other hand, shows the UUID of the beacon as well as the major and minor.
Step 3: Connect to your beacon with the KBeaconPro app and change configuration
Tap on your beacon on the beacon scan screen in order to temporarily connect to it to change the configuration. Here’s what you will see next:
What you see above is the General Information page of the KBeaconPro app.
As a first learning example, let’s imagine we have two beacons, so we need to change the UUID of one of them in order for them to have unique ID numbers (i.e. different from each other).
-Tap on the info page where is shows SLOT0 iBeacon. This will open up the following Beacon Detail sub-menu:
Now tap on the UUID. This will bring up the sub-menu:
OK, so you could theoretically put a totally new number here, but let’s be lazy and just change the last two digits from F4 to F5.
-Once you have made that change, tap on the SAVE button in the upper right corner.
-This saves the changed UUID to the memory of the app, but it has not yet been uploaded to the beacon. This allows you to make multiple changes and then upload them all at one time. I don’t recommend you doing that until you are very familiar with your beacon, as it can get a bit confusing for new users to change multiple settings at one time.
-So now we have saved this new UUID in the app, let’s tap the BACK button (in the upper left corner of the app screen) to go back to the previous sub-menu. Then on that page, tap UPLOAD to upload the new UUID to the beacon.
-OK, we are done now. But don’t forget to disconnect from the beacon, otherwise it won’t broadcast. You can disconnect by tapping the left pointing arrow on the general info page of the app. You will then jump back to the main scan screen of the app.
-If you have an Android, you will see the beacon on that page, but perhaps the UUID will still show the old F4 version. If so, swipe your finger down the screen to refresh the scan. Then you will see the newly changed F5 version of the UUID.
–If you are using an iPhone, you will only see “N/A” next to the UUID on the scan screen. That’s a security restriction of iPhones, but don’t worry; the UUID has been changed. If you want to double check, just connect to the beacon again, and go down the sub-menus to see the UUID. Don’t forget to tap the left pointing arrow when you are done to disconnect from the beacon.
Don’t forget to disconnect: Always be sure to disconnect from your beacon after making any changes to the configuration. As explained above, to disconnect, just tap the left pointing arrow in the upper left corner to be taken back to the main scan screen of the app. I can tell you from experience that quite a few users have skipped this step, remained connected to the beacon, and then got frustrated when the beacon was not broadcasting or triggering automations. The beacon must NOT be connected to your phone in order to broadcast properly.
OK, that’s it! You’ve successfully changed the UUID of your second beacon from the default F4 to a new F5 version. From a beacon scanner’s point of view, these ID numbers (though very similar to you and I) are totally different, and the scanner will consider them as two different beacons.
Next, if you are really interested in digging deeper, we will cover the configuration settings and options one by one. Unless you are trying to do something very specific and customized, you probably don’t need to read any further. Go forth and start using your beacon!
But just in case, here are all the gory default details below. Plus here’s a video showing how to change various settings.
Default settings for the General Information app page items:
System Info (these fields is not changeable by the user)
System ID is the unique MAC address of each beacon (it’s also printed on the sticker on the outside of the beacon)
Model is the model number BC04P
Hardware version
Firmware version
Beacon Name
Default is BCPro_(six digit number randomly assigned during production)
Name must be 17 ASCII characters or less
Measured Power (Calibrated RSSI when beacon is 1 meter away from scanner)
Default: -59 (automatically changes when the TX level is adjusted)
Changeable: Advanced users only. We recommend that you do NOT make any adjustments to this number.
Power On Always
Default: No
When this is changed to “Yes”, the beacon’s button can no longer be used to turn the beacon off.
Modify Password
Default: 0000000000000000
Changeable: any password ranging from 8-16 ASCII characters
NOTE 1: It is NOT recommended for users to change the password. If you do change the password and forget what you changed it to, there is nothing we can do to help you. The beacon can NOT be reset to factory settings in order to get back to the default password. We don’t have any sort of secret backdoor password to get back into the beacon; that would be fake security, right? So if you try to change this default password, be sure to type very carefully and write down the new password.
NOTE 2: If you still want to change the password, please note that the password is stored in the beacon AND in the app. So when you use the app to connect to another beacon with a different password, you may initially see a “code 2” or “error 2” message indicating an incorrect password. If you do experience this problem, please use the app to change the password on your second beacon to the same password as your first beacon. In other words, if all the passwords are the same, it will be much easier. That said, we still recommend that you do NOT change the password. If you are concerned about security, change the Advertising Flag setting to unconnectable.
Trigger List
Default: all triggers set to Null, i.e. no triggers
Changeable: See trigger detailed instructions link below
Firmware Update
Click to check if an update is available. “Network error” means no update is available.
Power Off
Turns the beacon off without having to physically touch or access the beacon.
Reset Configuration
Resets the beacon back to its original default settings. This comes in handy when you have made a number of changes to the configuration which result in the beacon not working as you expected.
Note that after you reset the configuration back to default settings, the beacon will automatically turn off. Be sure to turn it back on again before scanning for it.