Beacons not detected by ranging

BLE Beacons
1

Hi. I’m using Android SDK 0.16.0 and I have a mix of beacons.

Some are the older, smaller proximity beacons
Firmware version: Estimote OS 4.9.4
Hardware revision: G1.8

Some are a bit newer location beacons
Firmware version: Estimote OS 4.12.6
Hardware revision: I1.2

The older ones are detected no problem.
The newer ones are not. BUT the other night I’m almost certain I got ONE of the location beacons to work. I know this because I can see a record in my database that would have been created by this beacon being detected by my android app. So I think the issue might be related to the beacon configuration, and not my android app. Can someone suggest things I might want to look out for to debug this?

2

You’re using the old SDK, which works with the iBeacon packets. The newer Estimote beacons are shipped with iBeacon disabled by default, and instead Estimote Monitoring is enabled by default. Estimote Monitoring is what powers our new SDKs:

github.com/estimote/android-proximity-sdk
github.com/estimote/ios-proximity-sdk

So ideally, we’d recommend switching to the new SDKs. If you can’t for compatibility reasons, enabling iBeacon packet on your beacons should do the trick. (Do note that ranging/monitoring in the old SDK is deprecated, and is not receiving regular updates anymore. Also, 0.16.0 is pretty ancient, you should at least consider updating to the latest one, 1.4.5 I think.)