Get Distance using Android-Proximity-SDK

BLE Beacons
1

Hi Estimote team,

I’m using Android-Proximity-SDK to retrieve attachments which is successful by using Proximity observer but I also need to calculate distance between device and beacons. I can get measured power and rssi using estimoteLocationScan() but is there a way to use only proximity observer to calculate distance?

Thanks

2

We don’t currently provide any distance estimation APIs in the Proximity SDK, and don’t plan to. We found that most people want to use distance estimations for two things:

  • triggering an enter/exit event at a particular spot => our Proximity SDK does that
  • implementing trilateration/multilateration for indoor positioning => our Indoor Location SDK does that

(And note that in both cases, we actually use more than just BLE signal strength/distance estimations to ensure better reliability.)

If you (or anybody else) have a need for raw signal strength/distance estimations outside the two cases above, we’d love to learn what it is!

3

Hello, Estimote Team,

Sincerly i think that you are limiting your product, leaving only those features, because remember that the world have a variety of problems, and if you have more tools to solve the problem you could adapt to the new problems that come.

For example the idea for us to use beacons is to make an asset inventory, assigning a beacon to each asset, and the idea is to show all the assets (beacons) near the person making the inventory and show in a list ordered from nearest to farest the beacons as he aproximates to it, without doing a mesh or a mapping, so, with the actual functions will truncate our functionality.

Another example that i was working in the past years was a project related to automobile presentation showing, the idea was that a costumer could go to any vehicle in a showroom with the application ranging every moment an as he got near to the vehicle, it was showed at the begining of a list, and he could select from it and watch a presentation, sometimes the vehicles were too near so the proximity information was crucial to determine which vehicle show first.

Whit the actual function i don´t know how we could achieve the same funtionality of this two cases.

Regards folks.

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4

First of all, thank you for sharing your thoughts! All such feedback is really important for us as we’re rolling out the new SDKs.

At Estimote, we actually do a lot of asset tracking projects, and we recognize the limitations of the Proximity SDK for the asset tracking use cases. But rather than try to make the Proximity SDK “one size fits all”, we’d rather be moving towards more smaller, specialized SDKs.

If you’re interested in building asset tracking on top of Estimote tech, for now I’d recommend getting in touch with us at contact@estimote.com—I’m literally writing this post sitting at the Boston airport, having just deployed an asset tracking pilot at one of the companies here. And hopefully pretty soon we’ll have a public asset-tracking-optimized SDK to share with the community.

For your automobile/show-case use case: the Proximity SDK sounds like a good fit for that. What exactly do you miss in the new APIs? I imagine you could set up some mid-to-far range zones for general “here’s some cars you might want to explore” experiences, and pretty narrow zones for “oh, so you’re exactly at the vehicle X, here’s something more about it” experiences.

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