From my experience as someone who has already implemented an complete iBeacon based iOS App that is used as an art gallery guide I don't believe that this indoor location tracking you're advertising is working when there is more than one person in the room.
As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.
Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.
You are right that people and their bodies might absorb Bluetooth radiowaves, but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.
This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.
Low energy bluetooth is neat technology and I'm impressed with Estimote too.
My question is what happens when the batteries die in these beacons if you have set many of them them up in a constellation like this for intra-room location? Do you have to replace all together and reconfigure or is there some easier way to replace individual beacons that have gone flat and reconfigure them to act exactly like the one they are replacing?
It says it doesn't support their stickers because they are intended to be placed on moveable objects. That sounds like it is a hardware limitation, otherwise why would they be restricting their developer community? Still very excited about this.
Hi there,
this is Jakub, Co-Founder of Estimote (YC S13).
Our Indoor Location SDK was designed specifically for Estimote Beacons (the bigger one with bigger battery, not the stickers). Estimote Beacons with their adhesive layer were designed to be sticked to walls vertically. Thanks to their position and antenna orientation we are able to "estimate" position of the user inside the building. Indoor location is also power-consuming for beacons while they broadcast a bit more often, so we can do better math while analyzing data.
Stickers were designed for movable objects with much shorter range and a bit longer advertising intervals.
Any reason why the devkit is three beacons and not four? If you need a minimum of four.. it seems a bit daft not to have that as the default size and then sell single addon beacons as necessary.
This was a historical reason. When we started shipping last year we decided for 3 beacons since it was more fun with three than one prototyping beacon apps.
Since most of the typical rooms have 4+ walls we require at least four bacons to work with indoor.
Is the reason you cannot simply use a software/cell phone GPS solution to accomplish the same thing that there's poor granularity and potentially also poor indoor GPS reception indoors?
Yes. Wifi triangulation can work, but it's not precise enough unless you have quite a few routers. You end up having to use other signals that you're nearby, and track the device's own movement, I expect. In a way, what you have here is "indoor GPS", it's just tricky to get things as accurate as we expect right now. Ultimately, I expect we'll have to rely on lots of signals, including (for some use cases) cameras or Kinect-style tracking.
[+] [-] linkeex|11 years ago|reply
As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.
Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.
[+] [-] jimiasty|11 years ago|reply
This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] akent|11 years ago|reply
My question is what happens when the batteries die in these beacons if you have set many of them them up in a constellation like this for intra-room location? Do you have to replace all together and reconfigure or is there some easier way to replace individual beacons that have gone flat and reconfigure them to act exactly like the one they are replacing?
[+] [-] jimiasty|11 years ago|reply
Thanks to these features our beacons can save energy when not used, so if you enable "smart mode" they should last more than 2-3 years.
[+] [-] tashoecraft|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimiasty|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshvm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimiasty|11 years ago|reply
Since most of the typical rooms have 4+ walls we require at least four bacons to work with indoor.
Adding more beacons does improve accuracy.
[+] [-] uptown|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lstamour|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaye|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ende|11 years ago|reply