Battery level of cloud API is (almost) always 100%

I use “https://cloud.estimote.com/v1/beacons” to gather battery information.
However, I get 100% battery on all but one beacon in the resulting JSON. Many of my beacons are more then a year old, so I don’t understand why their percentage does not decrease, at least a little.

The estimated days is also almost the same for all. I have made contact with maybe not all, but most of those beacons on at least a monthly basis using the Android and iOS SDK, and of some I have made contact in the last few days without the value updating.

Is there something I am doing wrong?
The MAC of one of the beacons is “db9bcace45a5”.

Battery percentage available via Cloud API = the last known battery percentage of the beacon, which is uploaded to the Estimote Cloud every time you connect to a beacon. We’re working on better batter monitoring options here. For example, the new Location Beacons can broadcast their battery status without having to connect to them, which means that as people with your app (and Estimote SDK in it) walk around the beacons, they can act as “proxies” that detect the battery level and relay that information to Estimote Cloud.

In the meantime however, it’s better to use battery_life_expectancy_in_days from the API. This is an estimated value that is recalculated in realtime based on the beacon’s settings and the last known battery percentage, and so it should be changing every day or so.

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Is there a way to know when the last update was?

Currently I record the last time there was a successful connection (one that I think was successful when the API indicates this) and if that was more then a week ago, the API will connect again. However, as most of the beacons are deployed for over a year I would have expected some change (but on a side note, the system is not really in use yet, and advance battery saving is on, so they might just be inactive most of the time).

Anyhow, a way to know when a beacon was last sighted/connected would be nice.

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Now i am using Estimote SDK 4.14.0. It provides the battery percentage only when i connect with them. So i need to know, On which version it supports to detect battery percentage without connecting.

You can do that with the Estimote Telemetry packet:

http://developer.estimote.com/sensors/estimote-telemetry/

The Telemetry packet is supported by all the modern Estimote Beacons.

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