Get estimated distance to proximity beacon

BLE Beacons
1

Hi,

I’m broadcasting an eddystone UID with Location beacons (so I’m using location beacons for a proximity use case). It triggers when I’m within a range of about 3 meters. This works perfectly, but I was wondering if it’s possible to receive the estimated distance to the beacon when I’m further away without using the location sdk? Something like the computeAccuracy method which I encountered in older forum posts but I can’t find anything about it in more recent sdk versions.

Thanks!

2

What SDK/library do you use to detect your beacons?

3

I’m using the Estimote proximity SDK version 1.0.3

4

Oh, that’s not using Eddystone-UID then, but our Estimote Monitoring instead (:

Anyway, there’s no distance-estimation methods/APIs in the Proximity SDK. What do you need the distance estimations for?

6

Oh, my bad! :grin: I want to tell the user an estimated distance to the proximity zone or proximity beacon. I’m able to use the indoor sdk because I’m using location beacons but I was wondering if I could use the proximity sdk for it.

7

I want to tell the user an estimated distance to the proximity zone or proximity beacon

That’s generally a bad design pattern, Bluetooth-based distance estimations are not that accurate and tend to fluctuate quite a bit, so exposing that to the end-user might make them think your app is broken. Why do you want to show the distance to the user in the first place, what’s the “job to be done” here? Maybe we can advise a better pattern, based on our experience with beacons.

8

Usually bluettoth based distance predictions are not great always and seem to fluctuate. This can lead the end user to think that your app is broken. What exactly you want to do with it so that we can figure out better one.