siclark wrote:
Its the speed with which it can tell you are entering a room. A PIR will trigger immediately, whereas pibeacon only pings every x seconds. Less if a device is already seen, more frequently if its down. So if you are in one room and pibeacon sees that, and you move to another room, it could be up to a minute (default) before it repings your phone.
Yeah, that would be unacceptable for actually determining position.
You can change that, but possibly at a battery life cost, or network issue. Even then, its going to be a number of seconds delay. Maybe have lights come on full then adjust a short period after once you know who is in the room.
I can't really see this as a network issue. We are not moving a lot of bits here. Battery life, yes.
Perhaps an answer is to combine sensors? PIR responds immediately. If a room is unoccupied and the PIR triggers, trigger the iBeacon device to ping immediately to try to determine who entered the room. The only problem then is, how long the PIR remains triggered.
Most rooms have a "funnel", the doorway. To get into a room you must pass through the funnel. Short-range sensing, e.g. RFID, would work there. The only issue then is direction.
brianlloyd wrote:The other issue is in knowing that the person is actually in the room, and not say just the other side of the wall, which is iffy as it relies on simple interpolation of the signal strength. Here the fact that RF doesnt go through the wall could be your advantage. Tune the rPi in each room to only detect a beacon in that room, and not a weaker one that is coming through a wall, and you should more robustly detect presence in that room, and not get false positives.
siclark wrote:You do then lose the ability to know that that beacon is in the house, but in a room not covered with a rPi, so it depends on what your objectives are, or use a different presence means for whole house presence.
It seems to me that one is trying to put too much on iBeacon then. Use geofencing to determine presence or absence from the house. Use per-room beacons to determine localization within the house. I keep coming back to needing multiple layers of functionality to achieve what I want. Until I can reliably place all the people in the house, I am limited as to the next level of automation.
And the answer may be cameras located at doorways feeding a recognition algorithm running in a neural net machine. Yeah, that may seem overkill but we are getting to the point where that may be approaching cost-effective.
brianlloyd wrote:If used in the reverse direction the iPhone knows which room it has entered and can communicate that back to Indigo. It seems to me this is a logical extension to Indigo Touch, to have it transmit to Indigo any iBeacons it is receiving and their RSSI value. Hmm, when Indigo Touch connects to Indigo, does it identify the device it is running on and thus imply who is doing what?
siclark wrote:Wouldnt this have a drain on the iphone battery? And yes, think that it would involve Indigo touch having users setup, which I recall being on the wish list for Indigo Touch, but no idea when or if that would make it in.
It would be a potential drain on the battery. That does seem like a relatively straight-forward addition. Apple maintains a LOT of identifying information in a phone.
The more I think about iBeacon the more it is feeling to me like, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." I don't think iBeacon will work well for high-reliability localization of people within a building. I would love to hear more from people who have implemented it.