CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bluetooth-lowenergyaltbeacon
Mikes3ds
Mikes3ds

Reputation: 600

How to set Transmitting Speed vs Scanning Speeds for Altbeacon Library

The Altlibary is great at detection! One thing we noticed with testing is if we have an app doing both transmitting and receiving we are not picking up the other phones at times. (Very sporadic) With real devices like ibeacons we are constantly able to pick them up.

My question is how do we control the frequency of the transmitter vs the frequency of the scanning (recieving) so that we can both do transmission and detection at the same time?

My goal is to achieve the best of both worlds scanning and transmitting, is that even possible.

https://altbeacon.github.io/android-beacon-library/beacon-transmitter.html

Upvotes: 0

Views: 188

Answers (1)

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 64941

By default, the Android Beacon Library's BeaconTransmitter uses the highest power and frequency allowed by the underlying APIs in the Android operating system. Here are the settings, showing the defaults:

beaconTransmitter.setAdvertiseTxPowerLevel(
            AdvertiseSettings.ADVERTISE_TX_POWER_HIGH);
beaconTransmitter.setAdvertiseMode(
            AdvertiseSettings.ADVERTISE_MODE_LOW_LATENCY);

While the settings are configurable, presumably you already want the fastest and strongest advertising for you use case. And that is exactly what the library does with no extra configuration. (Note: there is very little reason to lower the transmit power or frequency, because tests show that transmitters use negligible battery. See my blog post here: http://www.davidgyoungtech.com/2015/11/12/battery-friendly-beacon-transmission)

If you are seeing that hardware beacons are reliable, but some phone models' transmitters are not detected infrequently, then the issue may be hardware issues with those phones themselves. You may wish to characterize which ones are problematic.

I can confirm that I see very strong transmissions from the Pixel 3a, Moto G7, Samsung Galaxy S10 and Huawei P9 Lite I have handy.

Upvotes: 2

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