Hacking IBeacons For Automating Routines

Every self-respecting hacker has an automation hack somewhere in his/her bag of tricks. There are a lot of modern-day technologies that facilitate the functionality like GPS, scripting apps, and even IFTTT. In an interesting hack, [Nick Lee] has combined iBeacons and a reverse engineered Starbucks API to create an automated morning routine.

By creating a mobile app that scans for iBeacons, [Nick Lee] was able to reduce the effort made every morning while heading to his office. When the app encounters a relevant beacon, a NodeJS app sitting in the cloud is triggered. This consequently leads to desired actions like ordering an Uber ride and placing an order for an iced latte.

[Nick Lee] shares the code for the Starbucks application on GitHub for anyone who wants to order their favorite cup of joe automatically. This project can be easily expanded to work with GPS or even RFID tags and if you feel like adding IoT to a coffee machine, you could automate all of your beverage requirements in one go.

17 thoughts on “Hacking IBeacons For Automating Routines

  1. Starbucks used to be really insecure, but earlier this year they started a bug bounty program and now their websites are like a fortress. It’s pretty cool how fast they were able to lock everything up once they started rewarding people.

      1. Keep it in more than one place, but divided. So that no single cloud service has the full data. I prefer local storage, it’s not dependent on connectivity and the data is not in foreign hands.

    1. +1, removed by a thief (including some curious person/hacker) or even the police because somebody got scared about a “bomb”. I mean it’s in the US, so…
      Also i wonder about legal stuff. What would happen if anybody put beacons and stuff like this everywhere (s)he wants???

      Oh and maybe this “design and development studio building world-class[!!] mobile products” should get his TLS-certificate for his main page right. FAIL!

      1. This is so embarrassing. I was just cleaning up some old HaD links in my browser and found this comment, tried again and: STILL no valid certificate 4 months later. This says a lot about this company that wants to do IT-work and what it says is not positive. Seriously guys… *facepalm*

  2. he could also save money by automating a coffee machine in his own home and maybe riding a bike to work (its only one mile!).

    just think if all that effort could have gone into something useful, he went through a whole lot of effort to deconstruct the starbucks API.

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