Stickers are the next generation of tiny BLE beacons, providing mobile apps with context of physical objects.
Create nearables
Beacons provide location context for venues. Stickers do the same for physical objects. To turn any item into a nearable, just attach a sticker to it. A Nearable is a smart object broadcasting data about its location, motion, and environment to a mobile device in range. With nearables, you’re able to design a contextually aware app for everything around you - your plant, dog’s collar, or purse.
Read more about the vision behind nearables.
What’s inside?
Stickers are adhesive on one side. There’s a small PCB inside and it can broadcast a Bluetooth Smart signal up to about 15 meters (50 feet). The advertising interval is dynamically adjusted by our adaptive algorithms, to optimize for energy efficiency and signal stability. Currently, settings cannot be edited.
Depending on usage, the battery can work for even a year. Stickers also have an accelerometer and temperature sensor. Stickers are waterproof, however, extreme weather conditions can impact performance. For example, heavy rain can limit the range and very high/low temperature can decrease battery life.
How to develop an app for stickers? What’s new in comparison to beacons?
You can find Estimote SDK on GitHub. You can use ranging and monitoring with stickers, just like in the iBeacon standard. However, instead of UUID, Major and Minor values, the sticker regions are defined by sticker type (for example fridge, dog, computer etc) and sticker ID.
It’s important to note that in case of region monitoring, there is no limit of number of sticker regions an app can be monitoring for at the same time. On top of that, triggers allow you to add another layer of context to your app, based on timestamps and data from the accelerometer and temperature sensor in the sticker.
Alternatively, you can change the primary packet to iBeacon and follow the same logic as you would with Estimote Beacons. Or, set a sticker to Eddystone-URL and broadcast a link to a webpage.
Data packet
Stickers broadcast our own Nearable protocol, which includes the following data:
sticker type (for example fridge, dog, computer etc.)
sticker ID (numerical value)
orientation in space
motion in X, Y, Z
temperature
broadcasting power (used to calculate proximity)
battery level
firmware version
Estimote Stickers also support both iBeacon and Eddystone-URL (from firmware version 1.3).Settings are adjustable for both packets, including changing UUID, Major, and Minor for iBeacon. See how to change the packets here:
How can I adjust stickers’ settings?
To order Estimote Stickers go to estimote.com