Is there another way to sync beacons other than using the official app & SDK ? In our use case we have a RaspPi setup with the beacons in the shop, I was wondering if we could use it to periodically update & sync beacons …
At this time, it’s only possible through our SDKs.
Opening up the beacon authentication and configuration APIs is something that’s definitely on our minds, and something we throw around internally from time to time as a topic for discussion—but we haven’t yet made any decisions, so I wouldn’t want to promise anything.
In the meantime, help me understand, so that we can add some more data points to our product discussions. Configuring beacons is usually a one-time operation, why would you want to do that periodically?
Actually we don’t want to configure the beacons, we just want to sync them to the cloud.
So that we can see the latest battery / temperature etc information in the Estimote Cloud Web Frontend.
You might want to take a look at the Eddystone, and its telemetry packet then.
You can set Estimote Beacons to broadcast Eddystone-UID, which is pretty similar to iBeacon—i.e., includes an identifier, and calibrated Tx power for distance estimations. If you do that, our beacons will also start sending the Eddystone-TLM packet every 12 seconds, which includes the battery voltage and temperature.
Eddystone is an open protocol, and there’s already a few ready-made scanners out there that you could install on RaspPi.
Yes, eddystone looks cool currently looking to that.
But this doesn’t solve the other problem (I still need to keep this data on my side and do an interface to check it). It would be much better if i could just use Estimote Cloud (That’s why you built it right ? 
)
I think you definitely need an aggregator device for fleet control. Doesn’t need to be a raspberry pi, some gadget which has Wifi and Ble and which will sync estimotes belonging to a specific account in vicinity to Estimote Cloud. I don’t think off-loading this job to an app which will go into an end-user mobile phone is a good idea.
Anyway, thanks for the advice, I realize this is not something that you can decide overnight. Just my 2 yens.
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