
The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale - GuiA
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2015/02/04/the-realities-of-installing-ibeacon-to-scale/
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verelo
Personally my experiences with iBeacons have been horrible. For an app of any
real scale, you want to control your own messaging, but most of the vendors in
this space want you to use their messaging platform (otherwise, what would be
the point in partnering with them?). Unless you go all in and do it yourself,
you're potentially setting yourself up for a very fragmented user experience
and fruitless campaign.

Additionally, for iBeacons to work you basically need the stars to align (or
for you to have some of the most trusting users in the world). You need:

* the user to have a data connection (likely and reasonable)

* always on location permission (depends on your app, possibly difficult to justify)

* the users bluetooth to be on (somewhat likely)

* access to send the user a push notification (in most cases, without this beacons are fairly useless as you're using them to message the user in response to their location)

In my experience, getting a few of these isn't hard, but getting them all
requires a lot of story telling and justification (and rightly so!)

This is much worse on iOS than it is on Android, but with Android 6.0 you're
going to see the same issues for iBeacons are you now need to ask permissions
as opposed to simply getting them as part of the installation process.

Essentially, in my limited experience with two different beacon installations,
beacons are great in concept, but in practice difficult to turn a profit on.

~~~
IshKebab
The only permission you need to ask for for beacon scanning on Android 6 is
"coarse location". Fairly reasonable I think.

~~~
verelo
Yeah I agree that is reasonable, but the other non-requirement based
requirements still exist, which add to the level of success you're going to
have when executing a project using beacons.

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manyxcxi
I do have to say that some of their pains could be alleviated by choosing the
right vendor(s). We started with a few Estimote beacons (they are fantastic
for small site/Dev work and really are a great company), but we met with and
found many solutions to management, security, etc. Estimote beacons are VERY
simple. Choosing another vendor allows remote management, health monitoring,
rolling identifiers, a whole host of other solutions to the problem.

We even went to a Meetup where Nordic Semiconductor wound up sending us some
of their Dev kits and WE created our own beacon OS. There are so many more
options available for really big installs.

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah the Nordic chips are really great. I've created a device that is both an
iBeacon and a normal BLE device, and another that is as many iBeacons as you
want in one.

I did try spamming hundreds of random iBeacons to see if it would crash any
phones (apparently that used to crash old Android phones) but it didn't really
do anything.

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flashfabrixx
The reality of posting a popular article on HN ;) Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&r...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2015/02/04/the-
realities-of-installing-ibeacon-to-scale/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

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jfim
What do museums get out of using these instead of, say, QR codes for visitors
to get informations on exhibits? Do these require users to install a custom
application?

~~~
manyxcxi
Having used them for a number of different applications, I can tell you that
they are way better than QR codes from a 'just works' perspective to the user.
Now, the dev/site team knows darn well that the hardest part of using beacons
is getting the distances/interference measured and dealt with, but at the end
of the day the user shouldn't have to do anything other than walk around and
have your app installed on their phone.

That is key, they have to have your app installed (and allow the correct OS
permissions). After that you can (on iOS at least) pop up alerts, passively
track how people are moving through your space, see what the most popular
spaces are, change your app context to show them details about where they're
standing, give them directions, etc.

~~~
greggman
I don't know how accurate beacons are but I recently visited the Greenwich
museum in Greenwich, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels, In
Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, and Casa Mila in Barcelona. All of which had
audio tours using numbers (punch the number on some device they hand you) and
all of them were fairly crowded and dense. If they were using beacons and the
beacons had a range or more than about 1 to 1.5 meters I'd imagine a lot of
conflicting inputs. I suppose good UX design could mitigate that showing all
the options from all nearby beacons. I guess it just has me wondering is this
a solution in search of a problem.

Reading the article it also sounds like lots of poorly designed software. The
author complained about pairing being a chore but it seems like with some good
software you'd just put up any beacon, scan it, then pick what it corresponds
to. If that beacon disappears or breaks just pick any beacon out of sack of
beacons, place, scan, pick what it corresponds to. That seems like it should
be a trivial 5 second operation. Am I missing something? I shouldn't care what
the id is. I only care that it's unique to every other beacon (which the
software can tell me the moment I scan it). I don't care about major or minor
numbers. Just put any beacon anywhere, scan, pick what it corresponds to.
Done.

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blisterpeanuts
Batteries: an unfortunate weakness of ibeacons. I would recommend a six month
schedule of preventative battery replacement. Someone at AnDevCon recently
showed how to replace Estimote batteries though it might be less work to just
go with Sticknfind or another maker that allows battery replacement.

Range: use the SDK to set power to a lower value, to avoid overlap.

Installation: maybe install small (white) plastic boxes to the wall with
screws, then can easily place or remove beacons. Color becomes less of an
issue as well.

There's a product "BluFi" or something like that, plugs into a wall socket and
utilizes both ble and WiFi. Might solve several problems in one blow. I have
no experience with this however.

Android prior to KitKat has some problems with BLE including inability to
clear the device table without wiping and reinstalling the OS.

I agree that BLE doesn't scale that well. Currently it's something of a
solution in search of a problem, but future potential is good.

~~~
eman2611
checkout
BeaconOutlet:[https://www.beacongrid.com/index.html#technology](https://www.beacongrid.com/index.html#technology)
I think you'll be happy. (disclaimer: i've been working on this for about 2
years.)

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tedmiston
Full disclosure: I work for an audio beacon startup (in bio).

It's great to see this article getting attention. I also shared it two days
ago in a comment on a story about audio beacons
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563134)).

Mainly my goal was to remind people there are some realistic use cases where
audio beacons >> BLE beacons. For some reason audio beacons seem to be often
forgotten about as a viable alternative.

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VLM
"What should be an easy and quick process is a mess of pencil erasing on a
floor plan combined with trying to track changed numbers."

I found this collision between thousands of year old tech vs modern tech
intriguing. In the business world, it never fails that no matter how high tech
an individual product is, it always relies on paper and pencil and human
operated accounting at some point.

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ctz
Site is not responding. "The Realities of serving static HTML with Wordpress"?

(I'm assuming its wordpress and a static blog at this point.)

~~~
tim333
Yup, seems to be Wordpress. View source includes "wp-
content/plugins/portfolio-slideshow/css/portfolio-slideshow.min.css" etc

There's a google cache

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MrQuincle
Absolutely true! It might come across as an ad, but our solution is especially
created to remedy these problems. We're using SLAM from robotics to get beyond
basic triangulation. And we have them behind power outlets to get rid of
battery and management issues. See
[http://crownstone.rocks](http://crownstone.rocks).

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gkop
> If we can sneaker-net a problem

I think from context the author means something closer to "hack" than
"sneaker-net". Sneakernet has a useful and more precise meaning.

