Estimote Beacon Deployment/Fleet Management

I’m curious to find out how anybody that’s deployed more than a few (let’s say > 20) managed to maintain their sanity when faced with a tableful of beacons with no external identifiers. I am deploying 80+ “Mint Cocktail”-flavored (I tried – they don’t taste like mint) beacons within the next 30-60 days.

I need to update the UID, Major, and Minor on all of them. So far, I’ve taken to taking the beacons 1 at-a-time out of the room with the other 80-ish beacons, updating, and slapping a temporary label on it so I can install/track the right beacon with the right location.

I had a momentary delusion of brilliance when I thought I could bulk update them all to “Flip to Sleep” mode and then just flip it back over when I was ready to assign it. But lo and behold, that’s not a setting configurable with the Cloud app and I’m not so brilliant after all.

Your wisdom is appreciated.

Rob

We deployed several hundred beacons, and your method is also the best we could come up with. We did a lot of walking back and forth into the office, and a lot of sticky labels. :slight_smile:

Another massive problem was that having hundreds of beacons in the office made it very hard to test anything - there are always so many beacons in range that it messes everything up. Eventually we made a box covered in lots and lots of aluminium foil - putting the beacons inside this successfully shields them off!

Thanks for the confirmation :slight_smile: I discovered the aluminum foil trick myself yesterday.

Hi reknab!

I had a momentary delusion of brilliance when I thought I could bulk
update them all to “Flip to Sleep” mode and then just flip it back over
when I was ready to assign it. But lo and behold, that’s not a setting
configurable with the Cloud app and I’m not so brilliant after all.

It indeed is missing and should not, thanks for catching that!

To help you please let me better undestand what are you trying to build.
Can you expand why you need to set explicit majors / minors to the beacons prior to deployement?
How do you plan to deploy the beacons?

Hi Marcin,

My application is being used by a town government to measure walking traffic levels and patterns for 80+ points in a downtown historical district. As such, about 2/3 of the beacons are outdoors. The major ID is being used as a category designator and the minor is the sequence within that category.

I’d never really considered waiting to be in the field before configuring the beacons. In thinking about it, I would not wait until deployment for at least the following reasons:

  1. My clients are in the Southeast United States. We’re entering summer and with most of the beacons outside and average temperatures 90F+, that would significantly increase the amount of time my team would spend in the heat.
  2. Beacons frequently overlap signals. The likelihood of programming a beacon incorrectly is high. I’ve already done it in just making adjustments to deployed beacons.
  3. Pre-configuring beacons allows me to verify that a beacon is functioning correctly and reduces my need to troubleshoot a beacon in the field.

Those are just off of the top of my head. Alternative strategies that mitigate those factors are appreciated.

Thanks,
Rob

We use a MAJOR / MINOR numbering scheme. One at a time using the Estimote app the beacons are set the desired values and then we use a special pen to write those numbers on the top of each beacon. Some other ideas are being considered, but so far this is working well enough.