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I have no hands on experience with BLE and beacons at this point, and am having a hard time figuring out the viability of using them in a particular manner. Wondering if anyone can provide some high level feedback about the viability of this use case:

The goal is to use beacons to track a running race. Runners with their smartphones would be able to log times when they hit various beacons spread throughout an indoor course. Pretty simple scenario.

The problems that I foresee are 1) the ability to continuously scan for beacons at sub second intervals, and 2) the ability to then determine closest range to the beacon at sub second intervals.

I've tried parsing through the estimote and kontakt.io SDKs and am not certain that what I want to do is entirely possible or feasible with these particular beacons (or any for that matter). Further, would there be any device (the smartphones) specific limitations that would apply?

Thanks!

Michael Caplan
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  • In my opinion this isn't going to be a viable solution - the range of a beacon, even with minimum transmission power is likely to be at least 5-10m, which might be OK for a long distance outdoor run over kilometres but not for an indoor course in a (presumably) relatively small area – Paulw11 Feb 14 '15 at 21:02
  • Thanks for the feedback @PaulW. I'm looking at a quarter kilometre indoor track. I'm also assuming that I can calculate distance to the beacon (and therefore be able to figure out the best moment to record a lap, or a "pass point"). Am I wrong about that? – Michael Caplan Feb 15 '15 at 00:49
  • Distance calculation is typically +/- 5-10m and is dependent on averaging (so you need the person to stand still for a while) – Paulw11 Feb 15 '15 at 00:57
  • Thanks @Paulw11. Back to the drawing board! – Michael Caplan Feb 15 '15 at 03:14
  • @Paulw11, just found this from [estimote](https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/201029223-Beacons-signal-characteristics-) about distance accuracy. For this beacon, the closer the more accurate. Speed of distance calculation is still a possible issue. – Michael Caplan Feb 16 '15 at 12:57

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If you are using Estimote SDK you can set this property on BeaconManager.

See BeaconManager#setForegroundScanPeriod. SDK Docs

Wiktor Gworek
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  • Interesting. kontact.io support said "They can broadcast their advertising packets as often as every 20 ms (although that will cause a very fast battery drain). I think you might have more issues on the receiver side – e.g iOS reports beacon scans only once per second." @WiktorGworek, would you know if there would be such limitations on the receiver end with Estimote? – Michael Caplan Feb 16 '15 at 12:53