What do you mean by connecting to a beacon

1

Team

I am pretty new to this world of estimotes or beacons as such. I am trying to understand difference between stickers and beacons.

I know we have a link and one particular sentence is throwing me off. I want to know what do you mean by connecting to a beacon for beacons and need not connect to a sticker for broadcasting or sensors as such.

can anybody explain please?

2

No worries, happy to explain (:

Beacons (and most Bluetooth LE devices for that matter) have sort of two modes of operation:

  1. Advertising, where the beacon just sends small chunks of data “into the air”, for all nearby devices to hear, periodically (e.g., every 1 second, or every 100 ms).
  2. “Paired” or “connected”, where the beacon is connected to exactly one device nearby (range for connection is usually much smaller than for advertising), and the two devices can transmit data back and forth.

Stickers broadcast their sensor data directly in the advertising packet, so, “mode 1”.

Proximity Beacons don’t, and the only option to access the sensor data is to establish a connection to the beacon, so, “mode 2”, and use that channel to request that data. This is less useful than what stickers do, because only one device can be connected to a beacon (and thus, read sensor data) at a time. Plus, like mentioned above, range for connection is also smaller than for advertising.

However, we’ve recently released our next-generation “Location Beacons”, which can also broadcast the sensor data in the advertising packet, just like stickers. So you could also opt for that. Here’s more about the new beacons:

What app do you want to build and how would you want it to utilize the beacon sensors?