Comments on: The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale

By: Joey

Joey — Thu, 04 May 2017 14:22:15 +0000

We used the Estimote beacons for a semi-permanent solution. We also had issues with the stickiness. I ended up 3d printing 40 or so “Shells” that would hang from the ceiling tile grid and contain the beacon. We also labeled all the beacons & shells with the ids.

By: Paolo

Paolo — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 20:12:19 +0000

First of all thank you! As a developer and Beacons enthusiast determined to avoid vendor lock at all costs, many months ago I have read this blog post and it posed to me an interesting, non trivial, three parts problem to solve. One. The problem of “tagging” an indoor area without having to bother too much where the beacons are located inside that area or throughout the venue. Two. How do you do it in a way that you should not even care about the identity of the beacons involved in a specific area? Three. How can you do it quickly so that when you swap beacons your areas / venue re-tagging process is not too cumbersome? So I found some spare time and came up with open-tagger for iOS (open = open source, you can inspect the code and the algorithm). It is not perfect, I consider it a first stab, BUT… when you do an initial installation, it should be (hopefully) way quicker that the traditional beacon room manual matching. When you replace, displace, remove or add a beacon, in theory you should be able to “re-tag” only the affected area (room in your case) and perhaps the neighbouring ones. Tagging should be quick and, given that it is not vendor locked, you can probably choose better beacons (with a hole for a screw, interchangeable battery and QRCode or serial number printed on the back, for example — ANY brand with a decent chipset). This last feature, I have not implemented or tested but I cannot see a problem with it, when I have more time to work on it, that is. If you can code a bit or simply can build a Swift app, take a look (after all, this blog post was the source of inspiration) https://github.com/PaoloLongato/open-tagger/tree/github-master

By: Glen Barnes

Glen Barnes — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 20:01:13 +0000

Interesting to see that pretty much everybody is having the same experiences with iBeacons. We ran a pilot with Auckland Museum and you can watch the short talk here by Nils Pokel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–D87Iusp2M.

In terms of hardware we found the Estimote’s to have pretty bad battery life although we did get some of the first developer versions and I think they’ve made some inroads into this recently. One other option is to not use battery powered iBeacons. I see a future where we will be able to attach beacons to lighting strips in cabinets and pretty much anywhere there is power. Also having iBeacons with bigger batteries – There is no reason why they shouldn’t have a long life AA battery in them as the Estimote beacons have the room for it.

The next issue is beacon management. A beacon with no markings on it really doesn’t mean anything and if you have 10 in a pile it is pretty hard to tell them apart. Management software are device markings will start to play a key role in keeping track of these things. I’m hoping that there will be some vendor neutral solutions that start to come out that can manage beacons from multiple suppliers. The last six months has seen a lot of work go into the management consoles of the vendors which is a good thing.

And lastly location and object recognition…A work in progress to be sure!

Glen

PS: There is a beacon manufacturer out of Auckland who has some pretty nice (white!) beacons – http://www.dropin.co.nz. There management console looks pretty nice as well.

PPS: Maybe we should have an iBeacon birds of a feather table at MW2015 for those attending? We can swap war stories.

By: Eric Bouchet

Eric Bouchet — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 18:24:22 +0000

Thank you very much for sharing your experience, it is always good to understand how others cope with similar problems as you had…
For the (absence of) serial number issue, the way we solved it on our side is to assign each of our Estimote beacon a unique number that we actually write on the plastic rubber. Instead of playing with Major/Minor configuration, we just ended up with a big Master List of all our beacons (we have 300 right now in several French locations, nationwide), but each of our beacons can be uniquely identified through the number written on it.
It may seem pretty old-fashioned, but it proved fairly efficient, and to come back to your example, if we find a beacon on the floor, we can instantly know where it belongs.
We have asked Estimote for a serial number though… not sure when this will happen.
Eric

By: Shelley Bernstein

Shelley Bernstein — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 14:39:39 +0000

In reply to Jan.

Thanks, Jan – this is very helpful. It drives me crazy, however, that we’d need to futz with making our own cases and/or taking units apart in a way that the manufacturer didn’t intend. All around, this does not scale!

By: Jan

Jan — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 08:11:58 +0000

Interesting article, we’re trying out something different with iBeacons: using them as a cheap way for indoor positioning and possibly, maybe later on, navigation. It’s a project at a (geodetic) engineering university so we’re looking at it in a more scientific way.

However I felt I should tell you about taking estimote beacons apart:
http://i.imgur.com/f7sRLzm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UtQGJF3.jpg
As you can see the actual hardware is quite compact and – from a purely aesthetic standpoint you could make your custom enclosures which could hold the major/minor infos on the back side while also allowing easy access to swap out the battery. Small tip in case you’re actually going to do that: put whatever material you want to use in a microwave for a couple of minutes – if it doesn’t warm up it’s usable (if microwaves do heat it up the material will diminish the signal strength).

We’ve been working with beacons from several other manufacturers aswell and some of them have thought about the problems coming from the serial number mishmash:
http://i.imgur.com/DK5qhAe.jpg
The white ones are from Accent in Spain and can be configured completely to ones needs, including changing of the uuid/major/minor. The black ones are from BlueSense in the UK – they’re offered in several different colors or even without the enclosure)

You can also see our sort-of custom mounting scheme aswell: We hot-glued velcro strips to the ceiling and the backside of the beacons so they can be easily swapped out.
One more interesting thing for you may be putting the beacons in corners where the walls meet the ceiling so the signal is focussed toward the room – a bit like a satellite dish (in surveying it’s called a cornercube or corner reflector, check wikipedia)

I hope any of this is useful – if you want to check our project out, search for my email address on github – the (android client + java server) project is available for whoever is interested and will still be updated over the next couple of weeks

By: Shelley Bernstein

Shelley Bernstein — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 20:49:11 +0000

In reply to Richie. One of the issues with Estimote beacons is the covers are rubber, not plastic. Spray paint is not going to stick to the casing material.

By: Paolo

Paolo — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 19:22:06 +0000

Interesting, I have tested some heavily discounted Chinese beacons and found them good enough (certainly a lot lighter to hang). How precise is Apple’s Map Connect really? That would be interesting to know.

By: Richie

Richie — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 14:42:09 +0000

Re: color – why couldn’t you get some spray paint and paint the plastic covers of the beacons to match?