Roll your own iBeacon with a Raspberry Pi and a Bluetooth LE dongle (Updated)

Developers who want to start experimenting with iBeacons don't need to wait for hardware to show up on the market or design their own. Radius Networks has published a quick "how-to" for developers that shows how an inexpensive Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth LE dongle can be set up in a few minutes for experimentation purposes.

The post, courtesy of James Nebeker and David Young, provides detailed step-by-step command-line instructions on setting up the RPi, downloading the necessary libraries, configuring the Bluetooth dongle and creating the necessary start and stop scripts. And with that, you can start designing the future with Apple's iBeacon technology.

Update: Reader Jason Goldsmith tweeted that "You can also use any BT LE iOS device as an iBeacon, so iOS to iOS beacons are possible." That provides another way for developers to test out the Apple technology, although it's not as much fun...