StarWardriving
Speaking to D-Beacons in their natural habitat
Installation Data
How beacon interactions are defined
Snowflake IDs
How Datapad makes use of articy:draft
Aztec Barcodes
What's Datapad actually scanning?
SWGE Inspector
Building a portable network datalogger for "StarWardriving"
Breaking the Loop
WebSockets for message loop fun and profit
D-Beacon
Disney's BLE beacons
Debug Menu
Datapad's Backstage
The Message Loop
Android ↔ Datapad
Background
Why focus on Datapad?
Tech Stack Overview
Library and API notes
BLE beacons are used extensively throughout Galaxy’s Edge and Galactic Starcruiser and serve a handful of purposes. Disney’s beacon technology, D-Beacon, has scarce information available online, but we can glean a bit both from what’s available and their references throughout the PlayAPI.
History
The first references to D-Beacon appear¹ on the web in 2014 in a “save the date” (archive) for a conference/event called The Best Of Disney, where Parks & Resorts demonstrated D-Beacon at the exhibition showcase. This is corroborated by a resume (archive) which mentions working with “dBeacon” technology in the summer of 2014. These are, by and large, the only two references (as of writing) to the technology on the web, aside from the various registered subdomains under Disney’s control that reference it.
Technology
From the linked resume we can also glean that the technology is a derivative of iBeacon, the BLE beacon protocol unveiled at WWDC 2013.
Unfortunately, the Datapad frontend doesn’t make much known about the implementation of the D-Beacon protocol. In lieu of deobfuscating the native backend, I intend to make a quick trip to Galaxy’s Edge soon and record some BLE traffic to learn more about the protocol. You can find more details about that endeavor on the SWGE Inspector page.
Park Usage
D-Beacons serve multiple purposes, including show control and device positioning. Since GPS/GNSS could be potentially unreliable within the park, beacons with known, fixed positions broadcast a unique ID, and the Datapad triangulates its current position using a lookup table of IDs ↔ beacon positions, and uses beacon RSSI to estimate distance. Beacons used for show control (triggering sound effects, lights, etc.) have a limited ability to send and recieve data. The Datapad can trigger a specific show effect, additionally providing an effect-specific payload and a trigger timeout. It can also send beacons up to 7 bytes of string or integer data, but both of these features remain unused in the Datapad.
Footnotes
- An attempt was made at redacting the confidential event information, such as expos, but PDF censoring is historically problematic.
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