iBeacon background monitoring issues

BLE Beacons
1

Hi,
I am trying to monitor beacons in background. In my app the beacons should be detected within 5-10 secs. I am using proximity beacons. Also the beacons are at distant places not overlapping each other. With estimote app I can monitor only one beacon. Also I need to know beacon uuid, major, minor through monitoring. But for multiple beacons estimote SDK its not working. I tried with CLLocationManager and didEnterRegion, its working but not reliable.
First of all I tried to set regions using their major, minor values. But it dint worked. Then tried by setting different UUID’s. It again worked but not reliable. When I am converting my mac into a beacon didEnterRegion gets called within 1-2 secs but with beacon it sometimes takes 5secs, sometimes 30sec-2min.
I am using ranging, monitoring, also tried calling ranging inside didEnterRegion. Using iPhone 5s.
Does anybody have a good solution that really worked? Or can anybody share useful code? Any help is much appreciated.

2

Can you try lowering the advertising interval of the iBeacon packet to 100 ms, see if that improves the responsiveness? You can use the Estimote iOS app to do that.

Devices => tap your beacon => packets => iBeacon => adv interval

3

Tried but not working. Do I need to use Long Range Location Beacons? Also when I visit cloud.estimote.com
Apps => Add New App. There it shows two options for monitoring notifications, Notification and Estimote Monitoring Notification. What is the difference between these two?
Estimote Monitoring notification:- Its associated beacons shows only the Long Range Location Beacon and not proximity beacons.
Notification:- Its associated beacons shows all beacons.

Can you provide me some sample code that works on background monitoring as asked earlier?

4

Well, was worth a try. Sadly, there is no way to control the Bluetooth scanning settings on iOS, so when it comes to the responsiveness of detecting Bluetooth devices like beacons, we’re at the mercy of the iOS itself. Luckily, as the hardware and software improves, so do Bluetooth capabilities—in iOS 7 and iPhone 4S, it could take up to 15 minutes to detect beacons!

Estimote Monitoring is our attempt to provide more reliable enter/exit events. Early feedback from its existing users says that it is indeed an improvement over the native iOS/Core Location enter/exits! You should definitely give it a try, although it’s currently restricted to the Location Beacons. We plan to expand its support to Proximity Beacons in the near future.

5

Hi Piotr,
we developed a smart lock app for the last couple of month and bought a couple of hundred estimote proximity beacons for it.
We are using it to trigger an automatic unlock command when you come close to the door. It has been working well during the development but after our first roll out we get many iOS customers complaints. For some users the enter events are simply triggered way to slow (up to 2 minutes or only when the activate the iPhone screen).
We are aware that positioning is very relevant and we set the advertising interval to 100ms for best results.

I´ve been playing around with the Estimote Monitoring and it seems more responsive. So my questions are:

  • When will it be available for the proximity beacons?
  • Will a firmware upgrade be necessary?
  • Can the beacon work as a standard beacon after that upgrade (for android)
  • Does this Estimote Monitoring SDK allow to monitor multiple regions?
  • Will there be a template for swift available? Right now there´s just one in Objective C.

Many Thanks!
Stephan

6

Glad to hear Estimote Monitoring works better for you!

  • When will it be available for the proximity beacons?

Can’t say exactly, but we want it to be rather sooner than later!

  • Will a firmware upgrade be necessary?

Most likely not.

  • Can the beacon work as a standard beacon after that upgrade (for android)

Proximity Beacons have limited support for broadcasting multiple packets at the same time, so we’re yet to see if it’s gonna be possible to use it for iBeacon AND Estimote Monitoring at the same time.

  • Does this Estimote Monitoring SDK allow to monitor multiple regions?

Yes.

  • Will there be a template for swift available? Right now there´s just one in Objective C.

Definitely! Can’t say when exactly, but we’re thinking about slowly phasing out the Obj-C examples, and focusing on Swift.