Hi all, thanks for an awesome thread with lots of great explanations. One thing I can’t quite figure out is if this will work well for a use case I had in mind.
Lets say I place a few beacons around the office, is it possible to get exit and entry background wake up events when close to each of those beacons all day? Or is this something thats only really useful for entering a “temporary” region like a shop and then leaving and maybe coming back much later or another day?
I would love to be able to tag a few things in the office such as the Coffee Machine so that when you are really close I can wake up and execute some specific code and push that to the Apple Watch.
My concern is that the user won’t leave the proximity and therefore get the exit and entry background notifications easily since the office space isnt huge, and it might be difficult to tell which Beacon the user is closest too due to the small space.
Does anyone have any experience with this specific use case, e.g. multiple beacons in a small home / office space and background notifications over a whole day?
For simple enter/exit events, you should be fine! You might want to tune the power of the beacons all the way down, and then the enter/exit zone should be somewhere around 1 m then. But it’s always best to just go ahead and try it out—every environment is slightly different.
Oh that’s awesome I didn’t know you can do that? Which devices? All of them including the stickers or only the new ones? Does anyone here have any experience with making these devices more like 1 metre range devices?
Also I assume the 30 sec thing might still count which is probably fine, to prevent the app from waking up multiple times until you’ve finally walked away from the beacon?
Which devices? All of them including the stickers or only the new ones?
All of them, yes! (:
Yup, on iOS, the exit delay is 30 seconds, exactly to prevent “false alarms.” Our Android SDK uses a bit less conservative 10-second delay, if I remember correctly.
Awesome, so which devices would you recommend for this type of application?
Weak enough to force enter and exit but strong enough to be standing at say the coffee machine.
If the stickers are just as good as anything else that would be good because they are cheaper so I can place them on more things.
Otherwise just wondering if theres any advantages to using the more expensive models?
Madhava
Actually, there’s this notion that stickers are cheaper, but that’s not entirely true. For $99, you get 10 stickers ($10 a unit) with 1-year lifetime and non-replaceable batteries (a tradeoff we had to made due to their smaller size). For $59, you can get 3 Proximity Beacons ($20 a unit), technically twice the cost, but they feature 3-year lifetime and replaceable batteries. (And Location Beacons are $99 per 3 units, $33 a unit, but the battery lifetime is 7 years.)
(Another way to think about it: stickers = $10 per 1-year-beacon, Proximity Beacons = $20/3 = $7 per 1-year-beacon, Location Beacons = $33/7 = $5 per 1-year-beacon.)
So I’d say, unless your use case requires you to use small beacons (e.g., you want to stick them to a portable projector, etc.), go with Proximity or Location. If you only plan to deploy in your office, changing the battery won’t be a major burden, so Proximity would be the most economical choice. (Unless you also have something in mind for the extra features that Location Beacons offer, such as GPIO, advertising multiple packets at the same time, extra sensors, connectionless sensor data and better fleet management thanks to the Estimote Telemetry packet, etc.)
Hi all,
I find myself facing the same challenges that a number of other people are facing in this thread.
It seems that Background Ranging is indeed possible in iOS as discussed here https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/203914068-Is-it-possible-to-use-beacon-ranging-in-the-background- and confirmed in this thread.
What I’m looking to understand more is if in the time since this thread was last updated anything has changed as far as anyone knows in regards to the likelihood of Apple approving an app that does this. My use case,
I am using the user’s device as a way to determine how close they are to an interactive device. Beacons communicate ranging information, using the iBeacon protocol as you would expect, to a user’s device, and the device transmits a message to my backend so that the interactive device can respond to the the distance of the user.
The phone is really just being used as a way to locate the user. They won’t be looking at it or holding it. They’ll be interacting with the interactive device entirely. The app has functionality in addition to this which is why I’m not just using a location button or something, but it won’t be used while in range of the device.
The interactive device, and so the scope of the entire experience, is broken if I can’t range the user using their phone, which is why I think I have a pretty good case to get things approved.
So that being said, a couple of questions if anyone has the time
- Does the data flow I’ve described (beacon->app->app transmits location to backend) sound feasible with how background ranging works?
- Any opinions on the acceptability of the use case with the modern Apple approval process?
- Does anyone have more detailed documentation than what’s in https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/203914068-Is-it-possible-to-use-beacon-ranging-in-the-background-? The documentation in the article is definitely workable and super appreciated, just curious if anyone has anything a bit more detailed.
I am trying the same.Please suggest me the device.