Telemetry and Nearable Ranging?

LTE Beacons
1

Hello,

I have both Nearable and Location beacons and I’m primarily picking up the Nearable or Telemetry packets so I can gather the sensor data from the devices. However, I’m also interested in ranging, so I can get an approximate distance to the beacon itself.

I’m used to the standard iBeacon ranging, but I don’t see how to apply it to ranging to the beacons advertising with these alternate protocols. I know the Location beacons can run with both iBeacon and Telemetry enabled, although I’m not sure about the stickers running both iBeacon and Nearable… however even in this case, I don’t necessarily see how I can correlate the beacon ranging with the Nearable/Telemetry data that I otherwise receive.

So, any insight on ranging when not using iBeacon, and if I had to run multiple frame types, how can I normalize and cross-correlate information across the different types?

Thanks!

2

I was wondering if there is any input on the SDK side here, that could point out if I’m missing something in the ranging for the non-iBeacon protocols like the Nearable or Telemetry packet types. I can’t find anything about ranging enabling for these alternates, even though I do see I get rssi back.

Is this something missing in the Android SDK, or just not something that is supported by the alternate types?

Thanks!

3

in TelemetryListener’s and NearableListener’s Callback-objects contain rssi value.
So you can approximate a range to the beacon.
You can also use method from Utils package: computeProximity or computeAccuracy.

4

Hi there,

So in Utils I do see computeProximity which accepts a Nearable but does not take an EstimoteTelemetry parameter. The EstimoteTelemetry itself does contain rssi but doesn’t seem to have the transmitting power value that some of the other frame types do… so I’m wondering if that is the reason that I can’t do ranging (and the SDK doesn’t provide a mechanism) with the EstimoteTelemetry while I can with Nearables and Beacons.

5

Nearable and iBeacon packets embed some extra information for the computeProximity and computeAccuracy methods to be able to do their job. Estimote Telemetry packets don’t, they are primarily meant for accessing sensor data. Estimote Beacons can broadcast both Telemetry and iBeacon at the same time, so if you need both sensor data and proximity estimations, have you considered using both packets?

6

So that would work for me… how can I correlate the different packets? Last I looked the identifier was different… so what’s the way to correlate a Telemetry and iBeacon packet to do this measurement?

Thanks!