Asset Tracking without LTE Beacons

Asset Tracking
1

Hi, I’m looking to do an asset tracking implementation. Trying to figure out how to do it with the variety of products you have.

  1. Is it possible to use the UWB Location Beacon or the regular Location Beacon for asset tracking? I don’t want to use the LTE Beacon because of the subscription cost; we don’t need LTE since Wi-Fi works for us because this is indoors.

  2. Is there a software/cloud subscription cost for the Proximity Tags if we use these to tag the tracked assets? Or is the subscription cost only for the beacons? Is that the $2/month cost?

  3. Is it possible to load the estimote location engine on our own servers so that we don’t have to use the cloud? we have to deal with some red tape of approvals if we use a cloud service.

Thank you

2

The general idea behind tracking assets with LTE Beacons is:

  • you put some beacons on the assets, to broadcast Bluetooth signal, so that the assets become detectable via Bluetooth
  • you put LTE Beacons in the areas where you want the assets to be tracked, and program the LTE Beacons to scan for the Bluetooth signal from the assets; when signal is discovered, the LTE Beacon sends that info to Estimote Cloud; same when signal is lost

If you don’t want to use the LTE Beacons, you can replace it with anything else that can scan for Bluetooth signals. In your case, I assume you’d want something that has WiFi. For example, it could be a cheap Android device, or maybe even an Android Things device.

Then, you get the option to either use Estimote Beacons and Estimote SDKs (e.g., our Android Proximity SDK, which also works on Android Things) to do the signal-detecting part, but that will still require Estimote Cloud subscription. If you want to avoid that, you can switch your Estimote Beacons to standard iBeacon or Eddystone broadcasting, and use any other iBeacon/Eddystone-detection library out there.

All in all, I’d say this comes down to how much work you want to do yourself, and how much you want to rely on our software instead. If you do things yourself, no Estimote subscription costs for you, but instead an up-front investment on your side to build things out.

If you want, you can email our team at contact@estimote.com, and they can help you price things out, and then you can make the decision about what’s gonna be more cost-effective for you.

3

Thank you for your response Piotr

4

You put some beacons on the assets, to broadcast Bluetooth signal, so that the assets become detectable via Bluetooth.