Stickers distance API

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1

Stickers broadcast Nearable and iBeacon packets.

Why do you provide distance API for beacons Utils.computeAccuracy(), but not for the nearables? :scream:

i.e.
Why donā€™t you provide MeasuredPower for the Nearables?

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It seems that the problem is with the power consumption. Apparently the beacons when used for indoor location have a very short broadcast interval which reduces battery life. Setting the nearables to advertise as often will reduce severely their life.
This is what I glanced from few exchanges with them.

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3

@tchavdar is correct. For the distance estimations to work well, beacons need to broadcast pretty often. Our Indoor Location for examples requires 200 ms advertising interval or less. But stickers have a battery 1/10th the size of the beaconā€™s, so we canā€™t recommend setting intervals this low. The default is ~ 2.5 s when sticker is not moving, and ~ 1 s when stick is in motion.

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From documentation I learned that it is possible to set broadcasting interval of a nearable between 100ms and 5 s. So technically it is possible to use nearables to estimate distance, it is just your software limitation, right?

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Right. Most people will stick to the defaults though, and we want to make sure we manage expectations correctly. We donā€™t exclude adding distance estimations for stickers in the future, itā€™s just, weā€™re still figuring out the right way to do it. The goal would be to enable ā€œpower usersā€ to access the estimations, but if somebodyā€™s still on the default settings, we donā€™t want to them to get completely wrong estimations, or just a string of ā€œunknown distanceā€ errors.

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6

When do you plan to release new SDK for Android?
I would like to have an API to get the interval of a nearable to be able to adjust scanning interval like in your Estimote App.

Are you planning to opensource the SDK?

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Thereā€™ll be a new release this week most likely, with support for our new Location Beacons. Iā€™m afraid I canā€™t promise any timeline w/ regards to being able to change stickersā€™ settings from Android.

Re: open-sourcing, itā€™s something we talk about a lot internally, and would probably love for it to happen some day in one form or another, but unfortunately no immediate plans.