Distance When Connected To Beacon

I’ve read some posts on here and I think I know the answer, but i really really hope I am wrong. When I am connected to a beacon, is there no way to get a constant update of the distance from a connected beacon? I am looking to get a constant update (every second or so) on how far my phone is from a connected beacon. What I am trying to do is the following: Once I get past a certain distance from the connected beacon, I would like to disconnect from the beacon.

Afraid you’re right. A workaround I can think of: use the RSSI instead, would that work?

I read some posts and tried to get the RSSI value to be the trigger. But, if I understand RSSI correctly, is the RSSI value not fixed upon connecting to a beacon? Meaning the RSSI value wont change once I have connected to that beacon or should it change even while I am connected to the beacon?

Also, are there any plans of addressing this item in the future/is it even possible to address this (allow for distance to be determined after connecting) given the hardware? I am a bit naive when it comes to some of the specifics with the hardware.

Ah, yes, of course, you’re right. This used to be possible in SDK < 3 though, so we could consider restoring RSSI updates when connected to a beacon. Honestly, seems like a niche use case though—what’s your idea behind connecting to and disconnecting from a beacon at a certain distance?

Essentially what I would like to do is connect to a beacon, and read information from that beacon. Then once I move beyond a certain range, and closer to another beacon, disconnect from that first beacon, and connect to the second one. I can do everything fine, but triggering the disconnect via distance is what I am getting hung up on.

Gotcha—which information do you need to access? Keep in mind that (a) while connected to a beacon, the broadcasting stops, so no other device can detect the beacon, and (b) the connected state uses up much more power than broadcasting, so if you connect and disconnect a lot, it’ll impact the battery life.

If you only need to track if the beacon is in motion or not, you can do that without connecting with motion UUID.

Also, stickers broadcast much more data than beacons, so they could potentially fit your use case better?

i think MotionUUID may work for me. After seeing this post and looking into it a bit, I am still slightly confused. I have updated to 3.0 SDK and changed all necessary items in my app so it runs properly and I am getting the same results as before (so I know the SDK has been 1) installed properly and 2) ive migrated my app to run with new sdk). I am confused on how I enable the MotionUUID. From reading the text that comes along with the frame work and looking at several different posts on here, it seems that I should be turning out the MotionUUID option similar to how I enabled the accelerometer - going into the Estimote APP, connecting to a beacon, and flipping the switch to enable it. Is that not correct?

We don’t have a switch for enabling Motion UUID in the app yet, you’ll need to do that via the SDK.

I’ve just updated the article I linked to above to account for the changes we’ve made in SDK 3.0. It tells which methods to use to enable Motion UUID, and also how to use it to define “static” and “motion” regions. Let me know if anything’s unclear, happy to incorporate any feedback!

So if i understand the “prerequisites” section of that article correctly, then the motionUUID is not automatically sensed. You need to first enable motionUUID programmatically by connecting to the beacon and then enabling motionUUID via the method below (from the article you linked to)?

motionUUIDEnabled = YES
enabled by enableMotionUUID:completion: