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Comment by fdezjose | Hacker News Reader

Very cool SDK Jakub, congrats! Lots of possibilities.

What is the coverage area of 1 beacons? If I want to map a big hall, how far should each beacon be placed one from another?

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Hey this is Steve Cheney from Estimote. We encourage you to experiment. Basically you can cover a fairly large venue (100 feet or more on a side) with just 4 beacons. It depends on some of the variables of the venue -- walls, surfaces, existence of metal and glass for instance. But the point of the SDK is to provide smoothing and consistency and have the phone itself help resolve user location while beacons also continually reduce error propagation of signals. We have a team of PhD's building this product and taking into account tons of smart data science. The ultimate goal is to have a venue covered without requiring an entire "cell network" of beacons. You can get greater accuracy by testing with multiple beacons per wall though. We would love your feedback on what works best for you as you iterate so we can also put these improvements into the SDK.

Thanks for the support!

Would a space with multiple aisles (think grocery store) be hard to map with your current algorithm? Or if I add beacons to each aisle I should be good to go?

No connection with Estimate personally, but given what I've observed about their beacons' signal strength and what they said earlier focusing on mapping the four walls of a room, I would place the beacons along the store's four edge walls, and for better coverage in isles, I'd place beacons at the far walls of each isle end. If the device can't see both beacons, one on each end's facing wall (the outer wall, that is) then I'd consider placing more in the middle, perhaps one every 3-5 isles? It's tricky, because if the signal strength is uneven, I expect the algorithm might get confused, unless the calibration or additional beacons can help. It's possible that they'll also release an update (if it doesn't already work this way) that will support beacons "in the middle of the room" but I expect the initial release was to map rooms with the fewest number of beacons possible. In a grocery store, you might even want a beacon per "section", so if you approach frozen pizzas, you can offer those deals, or whatnot. Detecting one beacon is a lot less work than trying to locate someone using every beacon within range.

The biggest sticking point for me, seeing this release, is remote management if you deploy that many beacons (how do you know if the battery died in one?) and/or powering the beacons from other sources at some point to ensure they last longer? Oh and it said iPhone, so does this mean Android is excluded, or this is simply a first release, and as iBeacons, you can't really advertise for Android these days? :)

Finally, it would be very interesting if you were also able to use WiFi and any other signal strength indicators to assist in triangulating where a user happens to be, including perhaps M7/M8 motion. I'm sure you've thought of this. Bravo for the work so far!

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