This is a script I hacked together based on Google's Eddystone URL beacon script. URL beacons require the user to have a special app installed, where as UID beacons supposedly show up for everyone who has Google Play Services installed and bluetooth on. The usage is kinda rough right now. You must have hcitool installed, which is in the bluez package on debian and presumably similarly named packages on other distros. Next, generate the message payload with the genmsg.py script in this repo:

./genmsg.py example.org 000000

Use a domain you own if possible. The first ten bytes of the sha1 has of the sum of the domain are used as the identifier for all of your beacons, and the six characters after that are used as an identifier for this beacon in particular. The output will be a string of hexadecimal pairs. Make note of it, we'll use it in a second.

The next step is to bring up the bluetooth device and stop any beaconing it might currently be doing:

hciconfig hci0 up
hcitool cmd 0x08 0x000a 00

Now comes the fun part! Set the message, using the string of hex from earlier where $msg is:

hcitool cmd 0x08 0x0008 $msg

Finally, turn the beaconing back on:

hcitool cmd 0x08 0x000a 01

The example.sh script in this repo will do all of this.