Areas using RSSI

BLE Beacons
1

Hi ,

I am currently working with your Estimote proximity beacon in order to get information on distance between mobile phone and beacon but I am receiving a really unstable results.

I tried an experiment to get different RSSI value for Nexus 5x on different distances and I see a lot of intersections between diferet distances which I do not expect. I will attach my experiments results with this email.

Experement specks:
Device: Nexus 5X
Distance 0.5m - 6.5m
Add freeqancy: 0.1 sec
Power: 4dBmRSSIListProximityTest.txt (9.3 KB)
BeaconProximityTest.txt (930 Bytes)

So I have several questions regarding your product:

  • How do you recommend to determine distance between device and beacon ?
  • What is estimated accuracy that I can get on distance between phone and beacon ?
  • Is there any influence on RSSI if you are using Eddystone or iBeacon and if it is do you know who is better for distance determination ?
  • Do you have any specific information how to calibrate phone specific phone with your beacon ?

Thank you in advance !

2

Bluetooth Beacons are not meant for computing accurate distance between them and the device—as you’ve noticed yourself, the RSSI characteristics (based on which people usually try to calculate the distance) make that very hard. E.g., without changing the distance, it’s enough that someone blocks the line of sight => the RSSI goes down, and so the algorithms “think” the distance increased. Even how you hold your phone matters, because of the polarization of the antenna, etc. Use the RSSI to calculate more-or-less proximity to the beacon (strong RSSI => likely close to it, weak RSSI => further away).

If you need accurate position information, that’s what our Indoor Location technology & Location Beacons are for. We take data obtained from multiple beacons positioned in known places around the room, and work out the position from that. Unfortunately, at this time, Indoor Location is only available on iOS. Android adds an extra challenge of there being hundreds of different devices, each with unique BLE characteristics.

What use case / application do you want to use beacons & distance information for? We’ll be happy to advise about how to best implement that, taking into account everything I mentioned above.