Can the beacon's LED blink manually?

BLE Beacons
1

Hi Estimote and the community,

I want to do the following:

  • In my app, if I click on a beacon in a list, this beacon’s led should blink.

Cause: my company have got more then 100 beacons already.

I’m using Estimote Android SDK. Is there a possibility to let the beacon’s led blink manually?

2

Hey Alexander, interesting idea. You’ve probably noticed already that if you connect to the beacon, the LED starts blinking, so that could be one way—when you click on a beacon in a list, your app can connect to it, and that’ll trigger the LED. Would that work?

Are you trying to configure the beacons, and need to know which one is which, or something like that?

3

@heypiotr
Scenario:
I’ve got a bulk of beacons on a desk/ table.
I my app I have a list of beacons on the screen.
Now I want to know, where is on the desk/ table the beacon with id “beacon1” for example.
I click on this beacon in the list and in short time I would like to see the “beacon1” blinking.
I dont want to connect to it, cause it would take some time.
Is there a possibility to do it in shorter time? (Cause connection to a beacon takes sometimes up to 10 seconds)

4

It’s hard to send any data (“turn the LED on”) to any Bluetooth device without connecting to it first (: I think what I’m hearing is more “I want shorter connection times”, would that solve it?

Most of the connection time is actually … discovering the beacons Connectivity packet. So you could try decreasing the adv interval of that packet. We also have smth called “Near to Connect”, where if we detect that there’s some device in range of the beacons doing BLE scanning, we automatically up the adv frequency of the Connectivity packet to max 10 Hz.

1 Like
5

@heypiotr
shorter connection times would be very useful.
I’ll try it with “Near to connect”.
Could you tell me, how can a beacon detect devices around it?

6

When a device is scanning for BLE peripherals, and detects a connectable packet, it sends something called a scan request (also knows as “SCAN_REQ”). We can detect when that happens in our firmware. And if we haven’t received SCAN_REQs for some time, we know that the device(s) that used to be scanning probably moved away.

2 Likes
7

@heypiotr
ok, thank you!