Hi guys,
has anybody tried to locate a beacon (instead of a smartphone) indoor? I would like to calculate the exact position of a beacon. Estimote shows that kind of use case in this promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cH44pE1Fks
with stickers. This is exactly what I want. But I don’t want to walk around with my smartphone to track all my stickers. What I need is an permanently “scan for beacon/stickers device” (maybe an Raspberry Pi or something like that).
Thanks
Florian
Exactly the same scenario that I’m looking to use. Larger locator beacons to act as the mesh and either proximity or sticker beacons attached to a device being location tracked.
Before I buy more or choose to use a different beacon type, does anybody have a suitable answer to this?
Example. Room mapped out and a number of Locator beacons installed within the area. Proximity beacon attached to a “box” the location of the box is identified back as to which beacon or “zone” it is in. No mobile device in use.
Beacons themselves don’t have enough battery power to support continuous scanning. Advertising is much less power-hungry, because the beacon only needs to wake up once every 100 ms or 950 ms or whatever the advertising interval is, send an advertisement packet (which takes a few nano/micro seconds), and go back to sleep. Scanning would require the beacon to be constantly active, which would very quickly drain the battery.
That’s why for our Indoor + Nearables concept, we use the smartphones as the scanners.
But I know developers that were also experimenting with using powered Raspberry Pi or similar devices to do the scanning part. Haven’t heard of any production use case yet, but it’s definitely possible. Beacons attached to a box, and the Raspberry Pi scanning for these, and then uploading the location of the box to some backend.
Thanks for the advice heypiotr.
We’re looking at the back end integration being done via a Pi. As we’re at the testing / building / seeing what it can do stage and knowing the current SDK for indoor tracking is IOS only, is this a path that’s worth going down, or shall we cut the losses for what’s done so far and use the back end as an iPad?
The idea being that the Pi or Ipad would run an application that tracked the beacons and displayed or reported on their location on regular basis (say every 30 - 60 seconds)
“It depends” (:
If you go the iPad/iPhone route, you can use our ready-made Indoor SDK to take care of the positioning.
The Raspberry Pi route, I guess it’s gonna be more cost-efficicient, but you’ll need to figure out the positioning yourself—the easiest idea would be to simply cover the space in a dense enough grid of Raspberry Pi devices, e.g., one per aisle, or shelf, or something like that. And then just knowing which beacons are in range of which RPi can give you info about which aisle/shelf it’s at.