iBeacon Reliable/Unreliable

Question

I am working on my home automation app. I am using estimotes iBeacons and what I want to do is give my Home Automation Control the ability to know my proximity in my home. Each iBeacon is given a virtual switch on my Home Controller and when I come in contact with a iBeacon my device either in foreground or background will update my control to turn on my switch for when I am near a beacon and turn it off when I have wondered away from my beacon. All of this works perfectly and I am loving it, however some of my conditions rely on me to be in a proximity for a period of time, and what I am noticing is after a couple of minutes or even after a half hour of being near a beacon, the iPhone 5s basically drops its connection and then fires it back up, causing it to perform an exit (turn off my virtual switch) and then immediately perform an enter (turn back on the virtual switch). As you can imagine this is very annoying to the wife and myself in the middle of the night when the bedroom lights start to flicker on and off because of the exit/enter. I have read about people having this problem and tried everything I have seen on the internet to no avail.

What I noticed is that whenever a monitor crossing has been crossed for a iBeacon, both the didDetermineState and the corresponding Enter/Exit call back functions are called. What can I do to get this to stop occurring? I can provide code examples if needed but this is more of a general question.

Answer 1

This is a common problem with iBeacons (and wives of geeks like us), and the simple solution is a software filter. You must ignore region exit events that last only a few seconds until you verify that there is no subsequent entry event.

You can do this by creating a variable (e.g justExitedRegion) that tracks these events. When you get an exit region notification, set justExitedRegion=YES and start a five second timer. When the timer goes off, if justExitedRegion==YES, perform your exit logic normally and set justExitedRegion=NO. Otherwise skip processing the exit logic.

Meanwhile, if you get an entry notification and justExitedRegion==YES, set justExitedRegion to NO and skip your entry processing.

Answer 2

If you just want to know whether you're at home or not at home, you could fire up the GPS on the phone and check your location.

Assuming you have a wifi network at home that your iPhone sees regularly, geolocation will work very well even inside the house where there will be no GPS signal. It will know no the latitude/longitude of the wifi base station and give that as your current location.

So use iBeacon as your primary location detection, but verify the data it gives you using GPS.

Also, you should contact Estimote to be sure you don't have a faulty unit or something. It is pretty new hardware, there could be issues.