Questions on Eddystone

RuuviTag Troubleshooting
#1

Hi,

first of all congratulations to the ruuvitag team!

I managed to play with the 3 kinds of firmware , weather, eddystone et espruino ,
update works fine, weather station is great,
espruino works although I did not find a use case yet …

My idea was to build a kind of geolocation inside a building
we have android and ios users

I thought the ruuvitag would push clear notification to nearby phones but I only managed to get notifcations via chrome
I use an iphone and it’s far from being “automatic” , one has to update chrome, activate the physical web, swipe right from home screen , wait … and finnnaly I discover my tag !

is there a way to get notification to unknown nearby phone without “ANY” action on the user phone ???
I can not expect my users to do all kind of actions and even worse check manualy if there is a tag around !

I hope my concern makes sense,

thanks
Jean-louis

#2

On Android, Nearby notifications are usually enabled by default. Meaning, one or multiple nearby Eddystone-URL beacons generate one (1) silent notification on the user’s phone.

Currently, on iOS, the Physical Web is not supported by default. The Chrome browser has to be used.

For sure, more possibilities are out there, but they require native iOS/Android application. You can find a lot of information using keywords: android ios eddystone ibeacon notifications

#3

thanks Lauri, I think I tried everything that was available but looks like none of the app I found is able to simply catch the eddystone signal in the background and push a notification on the screen like an sms or imessage would do !
I’m not a programmer so not able to build it but it looks very straight forward and should not be so complicated
no one else has the same need?

#4

You could try out Proximi.IO app described here.

1 Like
#5

great spirits …
i’m doing it !

#6

Hi Jean-Louis,

Are you using an iOS device with the background mode tests you described? The problem with Eddystone is that iOS does not have native support for it, and the closedness of the iOS ecosystem. iOS has very strong limitations on when you can wake up an app from the background. Reagarding location, you can take advantage of either large changes in native location (GPS/Wifi/Cellular) position, or iBeacons. We have built all the possible background support to the Proximi.io platform, but Eddystone background functionality on iOS is still something that works sporadically.

So one option could be to change your beacons to iBeacons, and then it works well. If I recall correctly, it is possible to switch the RuuviTAG to an iBeacon. @otso, have you heard any experiences on that?

I think Proximi.io would be useful for you in any case, for the indoor positioning and the push notifications.

Annina / Proximi.io

#7

Easiest way to use RuuviTag as iBeacon would be to upload Espruino firmware and program the tag as iBeacon as per the PuckJS instructions.

#8

Great, thanks! I’ll need to give that a try too.