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I've implemented this as a hackathon project a month ago (an iPhone serving as a broadcaster and an iPad serving as a receiver). It's an awesome technology with

by rada 13y ago

I've implemented this as a hackathon project a month ago (an iPhone serving as a broadcaster and an iPad serving as a receiver). It's an awesome technology with a lot of promise but my one BIG gripe is the imprecision of RSSI. At home, the proximity indicator was somewhat accurate. At the office the proximity indicator was not accurate at all - half the time it would be good but the other half it would show the unpredictbale/interchangeable RSSI whether the receiver was at a yelling distance or a whispering distance. (Maybe due to signal interference)? If RSSI cannot be relied upon, it severely limits the utility of iBeacons. A "binary" result (beacon found, beacon not found) can be useful but not near as useful as a reliable distance indicator. For example, my goal for the hackathon was to see if equipment in a lab could be activated by walking around with your phone. If the phone cannot tell that I am closer to equipment A than equipment B, then there is no point and moreover, we should not be referring to this new technology as "micro locations". Having said that, I know of a company here in Minneapolis piloting iBeacons as indoor navigation (to find your way in a mall for example). I don't know if their technology works because they've found a way to ensure more correct RSSI readings, or if they are simply relying on the assumption that stores are far enough apart.

Osmium 13y ago
Since you've got some experience with it, do you have any idea how hard/easy it'd be to get an iBeacon working from a Raspberry Pi equipped with a Bluetooth dongle?
- rada 13y ago
  I used Apple-provided bluetooth capabilities so my experience is probably not particularly relevant to Raspberry Pi, sorry. One thing to think about is battery life, unless you only need to pair the broadcaster and the receiver once. What I mean is, if you have a listener that is constantly scanning for a signal and doing some logic depending on the signal strength, you are bound to have battery life as your biggest challenge and potentially a deal breaker to any real use.
- adestefan 13y ago
  It should be straightforward with BlueZ 5. Good luck finding documentation on how to do it though.
bmleon2002 13y ago
RSSI imprecision is just the nature of the BTLE. Bluetooth signals tend to bounce around in room that is full of objects, heavy metal blocks signals, etc. To solve the problem, this can be accomplished by collecting an array of RSSIs and averaging them to get a more accurate result over time. Being said, for time sensitive use cases, it's pretty challenging to use iBeacons. Nevertheless, iBeacons has a lot of potentials. I also think iBeacon will eventually dominate the proximity detection market. Here are 3 reasons: 1. Apple has a dominant smartphone market influence. 2. Apple released the iBeacon spec into the wild, and there will be more companies manufacturing iBeacons like estimote. 3. Google's BLE API is not that mature yet.
- rada 13y ago
  RSSI imprecision inherent in BTLE is exactly the point I wanted to make. The marketing around BTLE focuses on "micro locations" but I feel that that's misleading given that in the real world, you cannot reliably get even approximate precision (let's say 5 feet) let alone micro precision. Human walking speed alone is enough to blow the whole "micro" concept out of the water. Another sticking point for me is the battery life. The transmitters are touted as low energy, which they are, being able to transmit for 2 years on a watch coin battery is amazing. However, a transmitter is useless without a receiver (did the tree really fall...) and the receiver is going to be anything but low energy if has to continually scan and compare surrounding signals. Granted, my demo receiver app was as unoptimized as you can get (one day of coding plus I am not even an iOS developer) but at the same time, it didn't do much but look for signal, and it was chomping through battery at an alarming rate. It was ok for a 5 minute demo but I can't imagine real users would put up with this for long. Given these two limitations, I have a hard time imagining wide adoption.
  - aflinik 13y ago
    The thing is they dont't have to work as a receiver. It's enough to pinpoint you to given location using data sent by iBeacon. Everything else can happen between your smartphone and web-based services that would provide more context, data or feedback to your actions.
  - 13y ago

by rada 13y ago

Osmium 13y ago

Since you've got some experience with it, do you have any idea how hard/easy it'd be to get an iBeacon working from a Raspberry Pi equipped with a Bluetooth dongle?

rada 13y ago
I used Apple-provided bluetooth capabilities so my experience is probably not particularly relevant to Raspberry Pi, sorry. One thing to think about is battery life, unless you only need to pair the broadcaster and the receiver once. What I mean is, if you have a listener that is constantly scanning for a signal and doing some logic depending on the signal strength, you are bound to have battery life as your biggest challenge and potentially a deal breaker to any real use.
adestefan 13y ago
It should be straightforward with BlueZ 5. Good luck finding documentation on how to do it though.

bmleon2002 13y ago

RSSI imprecision is just the nature of the BTLE. Bluetooth signals tend to bounce around in room that is full of objects, heavy metal blocks signals, etc. To solve the problem, this can be accomplished by collecting an array of RSSIs and averaging them to get a more accurate result over time. Being said, for time sensitive use cases, it's pretty challenging to use iBeacons. Nevertheless, iBeacons has a lot of potentials. I also think iBeacon will eventually dominate the proximity detection market. Here are 3 reasons: 1. Apple has a dominant smartphone market influence. 2. Apple released the iBeacon spec into the wild, and there will be more companies manufacturing iBeacons like estimote. 3. Google's BLE API is not that mature yet.

rada 13y ago
RSSI imprecision inherent in BTLE is exactly the point I wanted to make. The marketing around BTLE focuses on "micro locations" but I feel that that's misleading given that in the real world, you cannot reliably get even approximate precision (let's say 5 feet) let alone micro precision. Human walking speed alone is enough to blow the whole "micro" concept out of the water. Another sticking point for me is the battery life. The transmitters are touted as low energy, which they are, being able to transmit for 2 years on a watch coin battery is amazing. However, a transmitter is useless without a receiver (did the tree really fall...) and the receiver is going to be anything but low energy if has to continually scan and compare surrounding signals. Granted, my demo receiver app was as unoptimized as you can get (one day of coding plus I am not even an iOS developer) but at the same time, it didn't do much but look for signal, and it was chomping through battery at an alarming rate. It was ok for a 5 minute demo but I can't imagine real users would put up with this for long. Given these two limitations, I have a hard time imagining wide adoption.
- aflinik 13y ago
  The thing is they dont't have to work as a receiver. It's enough to pinpoint you to given location using data sent by iBeacon. Everything else can happen between your smartphone and web-based services that would provide more context, data or feedback to your actions.
- 13y ago