I have a few problems with the configuration of the beacons. There is a wide gap between the configuration possibilities in the cloud and in the (IOS) app.
You can’t eg change the signal strenght for Location in the app but you can change them in the cloud. The settings are transfered to the beacon, but in the app there these settings are not reflected. And so on…
You can’t see, if these settings are taking effect? Why don’t you have the same configuration possibilities in the app than in the cloud? How are all these different settings interacting with each other?
We simplified the settings in the Estimote app on purpose, and will be bringing similar changes to the settings UI in Estimote Cloud to achieve parity/narrow the gap down. (some are already in place, like the “enable/disable Estimote Monitoring” option)
If you want to use Estimote Indoor Location, you need a Location packet with +4 dBm and at most 200 ms interval, so we just hard-coded that.
If you want to use Estimote Monitoring, then you need a Location packet with at most 200 ms interval, and any transmit power—but we’ve decided to hard-code -4 dBm because it’s the most practical option (best battery life to range ratio). ((Remember that with Proximity SDK, you can decide the trigger range for your enter/exit events programmatically, it’s not tied to the broadcasting range anymore.))
(We’re also setting up some special “behind-the-scenes” iBeacon packet for both—while our SDKs mostly use the Location packet, they also rely on this special iBeacon packet for some background features.)
We might consider adding some “I’m an advanced user and I know what I’m doing, show me all the settings” interface. If you think that’d be helpful to you, we’d love to understand better how and why you need non-standard settings for the Estimote Location packet.
Yeah, I noticed the “advanced settings” in the cloud, EVERY TIME I want to change ANYTHING I have to click “show me advanced settings”. PLEASE change that back!!!
So for understanding: When I want to use Monitoring for Proximity I have to activate Location?? So if I disable Location Proximity shouldn’t work? And what are the settings for connection?
Our problem: We need to restrict the detection of the beacon to a room. We have to make absolutely sure that the actions are only triggered in a specific location. So we did some tests with some non standard settings to see, how they affect the detection of the beacons. This includes absorption rates with ceilings and so on.
Another problem is, that there is absolutely no possibility to group beacons together. E.g. I set the settings at a master beacon and then all beacons I add to this group will get the same settings. I am talking about big deployments of many thousand beacons, so clicking through every one will be getting old soon. (And I don’t know yet, if we will write a specific configuration app…)