Hi,
May i know the nearest sensing distance? We want to have very short range, e.g. 10cm or 20cm to communicate with our device for security purpose . How short distance we can set for the beacon?
Data transfer rate, what is the faster rate within the short range?
Any security feature?
Thanks.
The minimum broadcasting power you can set is -30 dBm, which should give a max range of about 1 to 3 meters, depending on the sensitivity of the receiving device. If you want to trigger some actions at a shorter distance, you could measure what’s the average/expected RSSI when the phone is 10–20 cm from the beacon, and use that as the trigger.
Data transfer, not sure what you mean by that. Beacons broadcast short (20–30 bytes) advertising packets every certain interval (“advertising interval”), so you could assume something like:
bytes per second = 30 bytes / advertising interval
e.g., for 200 ms adv interval, that’d be 30 / 0.2 = 150 bytes per second. Usually though, the advertising packets are static (exception would be the Estimote Telemetry packet, which contains readings from sensors that change over time), and contain only the beacon’s identifier, so the transfer rate doesn’t really matter much.
Re: security. Connecting to beacon in order to access its configuration feature is secured by our authentication mechanisms—a simplistic description would be, we keep a unique password for each beacon safely on your Estimote Cloud account, so that only you can connect to the beacon.
Advertising is completely open to everyone in range of the beacon, but there are two mechanisms you can use to “encrypt” the content of the advertisement. For iBeacon advertisements, we have Secure UUID. For Eddystone advertisements, there’s Eddystone-EID. This way, everyone can “hear” it, but only authorized apps can decrypt it.