9 years, 1 month ago.

They're not the same type of thing. iBeacon is just a convention for how to embed data in BLE advertising packets. BLE devices send advertising packets to say "I am here! This is what I am, you can/can't connect to me. Also here is a tiny bit of data: ...". iBeacon says that the tiny bit of data you can send in an advertising packet (31 bytes max) should be a GUID and two integers (minor and major number). That's pretty much it. You can't connect to an iBeacon or transmit data to it. It is a limited type of BLE device that only transmits (officially called a "Broadcaster").

Puck is a library for making any type of BLE peripheral device, including Broadcasters (i.e. you can make an iBeacon with Puck), *and* "Peripherals" which are connectable. When you connect to a BLE device you can then send it information, and it can send you information (and much more than 31 bytes).

9 years, 8 months ago.

The way I understand it (as an outsider who looked over the project documentation & code), the puck concept aims to extend the iBeacon concept (effectively a passive "tag" which broadcasts little more than identifying information) to sensors and actuators that can be linked through apps on the smartphone (so an event generated by a sensor can create an action on one of the actuators {like turn on the light}).