Beacon technology is maturing. Our team at Estimote is seeing more and more deployments using 1,000+ beacons. Projects like Qatar Airways and ZenCity are great examples. But this level of scale brings new categories of challenges. Device identification, settings propagation, or keeping the firmware up-to-date are just a few of them. Managing your beacon network manually becomes very problematic and cost ineffective. That is why we are investing more time and energy into preparing tools and technologies that make beacon management a breeze. Today, we’d like to announce some great improvements to both remote fleet management and mesh networking.
The command hub for your remote fleet management is the Estimote Cloud dashboard. We believe a centralized interface like this is the best way to manage large deployments of beacons. Lots of screen real estate, superior visualization capabilities, and the ability to access it from anywhere make it a perfect choice. Beacons don’t have direct internet connectivity just yet. The fact that you need to physically be on the spot to apply your desired settings via Bluetooth is still the main obstacle here.
Mesh and remote fleet management are the perfect match
We’ve recently introduced mesh capabilities, which let beacons talk directly to each other. Apply settings or update firmware on just a single Mesh-enabled beacon, and the rest will get the same update almost instantly. That minimizes the time you need to spend on location, propagating the Cloud’s data to beacons, from hours to minutes.
Mesh networking is perfectly supplemented by Estimote remote fleet management. It makes it much faster to perform the initial configuration of Mesh. Instead of manually connecting to each device, you can just place your phone next to the beacons and the remote management feature will configure them automatically. It can also be used to connect to one of the Mesh beacons to trigger network communication and settings sharing between them. As it’s constantly working in both the foreground and background, you can make it a function of every app — it’s a part of our SDK.
Bulk Updater - a time saver for huge deployments
This is where our new developments come into play. The recent update of the Estimote SDK introduced great improvements to remote fleet management. The Bulk Updater function— a core part of fleet management on mobile phones — was completely rewritten. The original implementation needed a fair amount of time to handle bigger deployments, and the new one has no limitation. It’s doesn’t matter if you have 3 or 3,000 beacons — it will always work as intended. You also have much more control over the way it works. You can configure how often new information is fetched from the Cloud. You can define the timeout period of the operation, if you want to make sure it doesn’t run for too long. You can also intentionally skip automatic firmware updates, to make it quicker to apply settings.
Deployment App - remote fleet management without coding
We’ve shipped an update to the Deployment App, delivering remote fleet management functionality out of the box. The new addition — a Remote Fleet Management section — provides a convenient way to apply cloud-defined configurations to your beacons without the need for dabbling in code at all. It will keep your beacons up to date thanks to the bulk firmware update option, too. And the cherry on top? You have complete insight into and control over the update progress. Keep your beacons synchronized, while saving a lot of time — and by extension, money — consumed by manual configuration.
In effect, we’ve brought down the time needed to update an entire bulk bag of beacons — you just need 3 minutes to update the settings on 25 beacons, or 15 minutes, if you want to also update their firmware along the way. That’s well under a minute for each beacon, and basically all you need to do is hit “Start.”
We’ve improved the center of command itself along the away. The Cloud interface now includes proper paging for accounts with plenty of beacons. The search engine is now boosted, too — it supports more fields, and is blazing fast with a 10x faster response time. We are also constantly enhancing our GUI support for Mesh networking, so you don’t need to use API to work with it.
Download the Deployment App from the App Store today. If you want to look under the hood, check out our SDK for iOS and Android, or simply download the app template. Once you have that ready, there’s a tutorial waiting to guide you through, including remote fleet management in your own app.
Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote
Rafał Ociepa, Community Manager at Estimote