Does a beacon know the distance to another beacon?

1

I want to know if a beacon knows the distance to another beacon and if i can access this information.

2

Our brand-new Location Beacons w/ UWB can do that. These beacons have an ultra-wide band radio in addition to the Bluetooth radio, and with our new firmware, this means they can very precisely (up to a few centimeters) measure the distance between themselves.

We’re using this technology ourselves to automatically build floor plans:

… but you can do whatever else you want with it, we’ll have an API to access the distance estimations directly.

They are currently available for pre-order at http://estimote.com/uwb

1 Like
3

ohh, that’s sound great! @heypiotr
I have the estimote location beacons but, I couldn’t estimate a device position precisely. So I thought that a beacon could estimate the distance to another beacon with more accuracy.

Thanks!

4

@heypiotr what is cost of packet of 4 UWB beacons ? Would this work together with that cordova lib ? https://github.com/petermetz/cordova-plugin-ibeacon
Thanks

5

Hi, Can we use this to show direction from user to beacon?

6

Not directly, no, it’s still just distance. However, since the distance estimate is very precise with UWB, you could ask the user to hold a UWB beacon directly in front of them, and turn around a full circle, and when the user’s UWB beacon faces the target UWB beacon, the distance will be the lowest. So that’s kind of like detecting direction (:

7

@heypiotr Can point me to the documentation on how to get the UWB based distance between beacons in real time? Is there any way to control how often a beacon will attempt 2 way ranging? It would be great if this could be done infrequently when no motion is detected by the accelerometer and more often while moving.

Thanks!