iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round • Hacker News Board

Re: iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round

#31

Post by lambda » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 1:18 AM UTC

kloncks wrote: post #30

mandeepj wrote: post #27

I was reading about how iBeacon will revolutionize contact less payments but when I read about square wallet, I thought this is already done without any need of iBeacon. Thoughts? Am I missing anything here?

Have you used Square Wallet yet? Experience is awful. It is thought that BLE might be better tech that leads to a better experience.

Based on this paper, I'm not sure I'd want to rely on something like BLE for payments: http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f...

Re: iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round

#32

Post by tlack » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 2:20 AM UTC

maffydub wrote: post #14

Congratulations to the Estimote guys! I've borrowed one of these to test out their signal strength/consistency. (At a recent AngelHack, I built an indoor-positioning system based on triangulation of signal strength. I tested with a StickNFind BLE device and a couple of homemade BLE(-ish) devices based on nRF24L01 RF modules. I'm hoping the signal strength from the Estimote is going to be more consistent than these.)

Let me know how accurate you can get your system. I was planning something similar but with the broad ranges offered by BluetoothLE/iBeacon I didn't expect to get much accuracy out of the system.

Re: iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round

#33

Post by maffydub » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 9:20 AM UTC

boobear19 wrote: post #29

maffydub wrote: post #14

Congratulations to the Estimote guys! I've borrowed one of these to test out their signal strength/consistency. (At a recent AngelHack, I built an indoor-positioning system based on triangulation of signal strength. I tested with a StickNFind BLE device and a couple of homemade BLE(-ish) devices based on nRF24L01 RF modules. I'm hoping the signal strength from the Estimote is going to be more consistent than these.)

I too have been working on triangulation - any code you can share?

The code I have is at https://github.com/matt-williams/blook8r.

My trilateration code isn't great - I tried doing it properly and couldn't get it working in the 24 hours of the hackathon. Positioning along a 1D line using signal strength from two beacons was much simpler and I implemented this and then bodged in a third beacon using some averaging.

Re: iBeacon Pioneers Estimote (YC S13) Raise $3.1M Seed Round

#34

Post by maffydub » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 9:22 AM UTC

andrewtbham wrote: post #28

maffydub wrote: post #14

Congratulations to the Estimote guys! I've borrowed one of these to test out their signal strength/consistency. (At a recent AngelHack, I built an indoor-positioning system based on triangulation of signal strength. I tested with a StickNFind BLE device and a couple of homemade BLE(-ish) devices based on nRF24L01 RF modules. I'm hoping the signal strength from the Estimote is going to be more consistent than these.)

I got some estimotes and my experience is that the signal strength doesn't change consistently based on the distance. I was planning to do a program using trilateration... but I don't think it would work.

My experience was that the RSSI does change reasonably consistently, but that there's quite a lot of noise (so you need to smooth it appropriately). I also get the impression that it's affected by orientation of the phone relative to the beacon, and also by anything blocking line-of-sight (including humans). Mounting the beacons high up could reduce the effect of this last point.