Nexus 6 only detecting 1 of 3 brand new beacons reliably

I received 3 new proximity beacons last week. I signed up for an Estimote cloud account and adjusted basic settings for one of those beacons. I then installed the Estimote Android app and selected the devices menu item. Initially, all three beacons sitting on my desk were detected, but when I selected any of them authentication never completed. I rebooted my phone and now I am only ever able to detect and connect to one of my three beacons.

I’ve seen a bunch of different error messages already, including:

  • There was a problem with Estimote Cloud: Could not retrieve latest firmware information: Could not check firmware status

  • Could not connect to beacon. Reason: Version service or one of auth services are not available

  • Error code: -3

Any clues as to why I can’t connect to 2/3 beacons, and why I’m seeing such a fantastic variety of error messages?

I have to say, this is a pretty terrible onboarding experience - if the beacons won’t work smoothly with modern hardware, in close proximity, with the official app, it doesn’t exactly make me excited about trying to use them in my own applications. I’d appreciate an email address I can use to request a refund if I can’t get the other beacons up and running soon. Thanks.

Ouch, that indeed sounds pretty terrible, really sorry about that! Can you let me know your Estimote Account login in a private message? I’ll take a look at our logs.

Also, just to make sure: two beacons are not detectable in the app at all? Or are they detectable, but can’t be connected to?

Can you check if the beacons are detectable with this app?

We’ll figure this out, no worries! (And naturally, provide a replacement if the beacons turn out to be faulty and somehow still slipped through our QA.)

Hi Piotr,

Thanks for the suggestions. I was observing a mixture of the cases you described (beacons not detected; beacons detected but connection failed). I think I have resolved the issue (details below) but I’ll follow-up with login info if I run into similar issues again.

I used the app you linked and was able to successfully ‘see’ all three beacons with it. After taking the following steps, the Estimote app also seems to be reliably detecting (and allowing me to connect to) all three:

  • ‘Forgot’ all other bluetooth devices;
  • Turned off auto-management of Bluetooth as requested by the Automatic app (I believe this is only used to enable/disable Bluetooth, but I figured it might be doing something more subtle that could interfere);
  • Disabled the background notification Automatic uses to ‘more reliably connect to the adapter’ (same reasoning as above);
  • Manually disabled then enabled Bluetooth (rebooting the device didn’t seem as effective as this action).

Fingers crossed everything continues to work. It might be worth adding those steps (or generic versions thereof) to any official troubleshooting recipe you have posted online, in case they can help others avoid my frustration!

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Interesting, thank you so much for sharing your findings!