Recently we’ve shown you how Configuration template can take some weight off your shoulders with large-scale beacon deployments. But that’s not all Estimote SDK 4.0 has for you in the fleet management department. There are two more nifty features enabled by Location Beacons and the new SDK: beacon telemetry and scheduled advertising.
Keep tabs on your beacons
Developers love Bluetooth Low-energy because of its efficiency and widespread adoption. However, BLE’s low power consumption comes with a caveat: the maximum data packet size is 22 bytes. Just enough to broadcast an iBeacon identifier or a shortened URL, but what about other information: sensor readings and battery level? You need to leave them out. And that’s bad news, because when retailers or owners of large venues (think stadiums, shopping malls, airports) start considering beacons, fleet management is one of the first concerns they raise. And rightly so. No one is going to invest thousands of dollars into new technical infrastructure if there is no way to maintain it.
Enter Location Beacons. One of the biggest improvements introduced in them is the ability to broadcast multiple data packets simultaneously. From fleet management perspective, this is huge. How so? All thanks to the Estimote Telemetry packet. Unlike other packets beacons can broadcast, Estimote Telemetry was designed specifically for the purpose of network maintenance.
Estimote Telemetry packet includes:
- battery level
- firmware version
- motion status and accelerometer readings (e.g. to alert you when the beacon has been misplaced)
- temperature
- level ambient light level (useful for saving battery life with conditional broadcasting) GPIO status (comes in handy when you’ve connected beacons to other devices and want to know their status)
It’s connectionless: to access data you only need to be in range of a beacon. That’s much faster than having to connect to each beacon to read and write its settings. And with the Scanner app, available as part of the Configuration template, you can be passing by beacons and see information update in real time—e.g., hunting for the one with outdated firmware
All according to schedule
SDK 4.0 introduces one more thing that will come in handy when managing big numbers of beacons. Location Beacons come with a Real-Time Clock onboard and you can use scheduled advertising to define when beacons should remain active. So if your store is only open between 6 AM and 10 PM, there’s no reason to have beacons broadcasting outside this range. It’s a clever way to save battery life, especially if you’re using many data packets at the same time or using power-hungry settings.
Protip: you can still use Smart Power Mode, which slows down advertising if there are no people near the beacon, to save the battery during the opening, but low-traffic hours. And it requires no programming!
Protip #2: conditional broadcasting is not limited to Real-Time Clock. It can use data from accelerometer and ambient light sensor as well, so you can make beacons activate based on motion and exposure to light. It comes handy for testing and configuration before the production deployment. For example, you can use Flip to Sleep to simulate enter and exit region events without having to leave the beacon’s range.
That’s it for today. Let us know what you think on Twitter and have fun playing with SDK 4.0 and Location Beacons. If you don’t have them yet… here is a way to fix that.
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote