> one thing I've thought would be fun is to see about how tricky it would be to repurpose some test equipment to be, say, a whole herd of Bluetooth phones[2] taking a walk by those iBeacons.
I suppose it wouldn't. You probably wouldn't even need to leave home more than once - to read beacon data with a BLE debugging tool like nRF Connect. BLE beacons are broadcasting devices - they don't talk with your phone, they're just shouting "I'm here"! All data the vendor can get must come from an application on your phone. Hence, just capture what it's sending, fire up a VM cluster and have fun.
I suppose it wouldn't. You probably wouldn't even need to leave home more than once - to read beacon data with a BLE debugging tool like nRF Connect. BLE beacons are broadcasting devices - they don't talk with your phone, they're just shouting "I'm here"! All data the vendor can get must come from an application on your phone. Hence, just capture what it's sending, fire up a VM cluster and have fun.
Hell, I might try doing that one of these days.