Electronics > Beginners

Presence / proximity detection, bluetooth?

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paulca:

--- Quote from: nali on October 23, 2019, 01:15:11 pm ---OK so you do want your phone(s) to act in Peripheral mode then. Not all phones support it but you can get apps to check that on Play store.

I have a similar requirement to you, but after playing around with trying to get the phones to advertise decided to make the BLE devices connectable beacons & let the phone do the scanning... this was a 2-3 years ago mind you just after Android introduced support for Peripheral mode and not many phones supported it at that time.

If you're using Android it's not too bad running background tasks, but iPhone REALLY makes it hard to do background operations (apart from of course Apple's own processes like iBeacon background scanning..)

--- End quote ---

Yes this was my original concern about android.  The latest Android has extremely aggressive power saving.  When the phone locks, the screen is off, it simply shuts down some system services, but it doesn't tell applications this.  So your BLE beacon app might be pinging away but Android has switched off the bluetooth transmitter so nobody hears it.

I found this with trying to use the phone to publish it's own presence while I was home.  It worked on the bench until I set the phone down and a few minutes after it locked it stopped sending data.  In fact it appeared not to have a functioning IP address either.  The only solution, as it still responds to Wifi beacons is to ask the router if the phone is listed in it's ARP table... which turns out is 95% reliable.

The other option I'm less keen on and that's putting a tracker bracelet on myself or one of those little coin cell bluetooth beacons.  If I'm not going to leave it sitting somewhere all the time it would need to be some form of jewellery and thats just tacky.

Still I'm not giving up just yet.  Maybe Android hasn't yet crippled background BLE beacons.

nali:
Seems to work on my Android Pie phone... I tried "Beacon Simulator" to set up and run an Eddystone beacon and set the screen to sleep in 15 seconds. It was still broadcasting after 5 mins, so you may be OK.

That's not to say Google won't move the goalposts in the future though!

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