How to set Scheduled Advertising

BLE Beacons
1

This post mentions the new location beacons are capable of scheduling on/off hours, but I can’t find anywhere that explains how to do so.

I haven’t found anything in the developer docs nor any options in Estimote cloud or Estimote apps.

Please help. This is a very important feature for our product.

Thanks!

2

Hi Andrew!

Scheduled advertising is still available in our old iOS-SDK. For more information, have a look over at our GitHub.

With our new SDKs, you can use the ‘Dark to Sleep’ function, which you can turn on via our Cloud interface.

Hope this helps!

3

Thanks Timo for the response.

The Github link doesn’t exactly provide much information on how scheduling advertising works, how it’s formatted, and/or what it’s capabilities are (e.g. can we set a weekly schedule? daily schedule? minute schedule?).

For our use case, we are not interested in the ‘Dark to Sleep’ function.

We were really hoping to switch from Kontakt to Estimote, but until this feature is available we simply can’t.

Thanks.

4

The way it works is, you provide a start time (hour:minute:second) and an end time (hour:minute:second), and the beacon will only advertise between these two points during the day. So I guess that could be called a daily schedule?

e.g., only advertise between 5 am in the morning and 9 pm in the evening

or

only advertise between 9 pm in the evening, till 5 am the following morning

5

Gotcha! Thanks so much for the response. This helps a lot.

Is there by any chance any plans to offer a weekly scheduling option?

For our use case, we need beacons to only be operational during business hours which almost always vary depending on the weekday.

Thanks again for your help!

6

Not at this time—I’d recommend just picking the longest window. e.g., venue is open 6 am to 6 pm on weekdays, and 6 am to 3 pm on weekends, then set scheduling to e.g. 5 am to 7 pm. It’s gonna use some extra battery on weekends, but that shouldn’t hurt too much.

7

Thanks! We’ll probably have to stick with our current beacon provider until this is available, but we’ll keep a close eye on if any changes are made.