Unable to find beacons using the Proximity Demo inside the Estimote Android App

BLE Beacons
1

Hello,

I am suddenly unable to find any beacons using the Proximity Demo on the Estimote Android App or the test app that I’ve built from the Estimote Android Monitoring Tutorial.This used to work fine until yesterday for both apps.
I’m using a VFD 1100 tablet with Android version 6.0. I’ve restarted the tablet, did a factory data reset and a network settings reset. When I reset the network settings, sometimes the tablet is able to find 1 to 3 beacons (never the same) using the Estimote Android app but not with the test app. Sometimes all 3 of them appear at the beginning and then after a few seconds 1 or 2 disappear and I’m unable to find them anymore. Also,in the first scan (using the Proximity Demo) after resetting the network settings the tablet can usually find a least one beacon but if I go back to the menu screen and try it one more time, again I can’t find any of them.

I am able to find all 3 of them using another iBeacon detector on my android tablet. I’ve also downloaded the Estimote App on my iPhone and I have no problem detecting the beacons so this is probably not a problem related to the beacons.

I am inclined to think that there’s a problem with the tablet or that I did something to the bluetooth adapter while testing my own app even though all I did is play a bit with the setBackgroundScanPerior and setForegroundScanPeriod methods.

Any help or thoughts would be appreciated…

2

Hi @Cruffy!

Could you send the values that you’ve set usingsetBackgroundScanPeriod and setForegorundScanPeriod methods ?

3

Hi @arek,

I can’t remember exactly which values I’ve given to those methods. However, I used the methods from within the MainActivity file, not the one that was extending the Application class (as the tutorial shows) and I used “TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMillis()” without realising that the argument for the toMillis needs to be seconds and not miliseconds and I think that’s where the problem is because I’ve set those scanPeriods to something like 25000 seconds. I did try to run the application again with default values to both scans but I still doesn’t work as before.

4

@Cruffy, It is probable that the issue might be related to the BLE stack of the mobile device.

Did you try to reset network settings in Android ? If not, you can do it by going to Settings->Backup and Reset->Reset network settings.

5

Yes, I did reset the network settings several times with no luck.

6

Could you post us a screenshot from mentioned Bluetooth scanner/iBeacon detector that you used on that Android device ? Does it show devices with names “estimote” or “est”?

7

Screenshot from a different iBeacon scanner

The devices are apparently named “est”