We set those internal thresholds before iOS 7.1 was released. It looks a little better now so we can probably lower them a bit. Basically the thresholds are set right now to avoid a far away room being interpreted as near before the ranging gets more precise so it allows for a few seconds.
One important note that makes it take longer: If you have two rooms, one has a Beacon and one does not, and Roomie is deciding between the one with a Beacon which is known to be near and the one with no known Beacon which is set as the current room in Roomie, we double the amount of time required to refine the signal.
So if you set to Gym room with no Beacon while Office has a nearby Beacon at 1m, in other words you are actually changing rooms to Office now but Roomie knows you are set to a non-Beacon room, it requires about 6 seconds to let that happen. Meanwhile, if both rooms have a Beacon, we allow a switch after roughly 2.5 seconds of proper ranging. Basically, this avoids the unfair advantage of being the only team to show up at the game. It does not mean they should always win in this case.
Translation: it gets faster and more precise by adding Beacons for every room.
One other little trick that obviates the above issue is to set the Rooms tab as active on iPod/iPhone screens. If the Rooms tab is Active, Roomie assumes you don’t care about leaving the current room so the thresholds are lowered to the minimum.
Thank you.
I wish i could try this, at the moment though i dont have a 2nd idevice with ibeacons (looking at an ipad mini retina later this summer).
The wife has an iphone 5s to but it seems like alot of work to get it working on someone else’s idevice with my config.
So im guessing that roomie will always need to be open on the device “monitor” but my beacon or phone cant have roomie app closed and still be sending a beacon signal? I would have thought roomie wouldnt need to be open for my phone to send a beacon to the monitor? Maybe roomie can clarify.
I guess my concern in all this is fail safes. My use case would be typically like the above poster to turn on my dvr when i get home and my equipment. But if i shut down my system, take my phone with to bed, but get up at night to check a phone message and walk near the room is it going to start firing all my equipment on again? Or if my phone dies and i reboot it near a monitor is it going to execute an activity every time and turn on all my equipment? Perhaps this just comes with the territory?
OR would that by why roomie needs to be open on my phone for this to work? So its not always sending beacons when a user wouldnt want them?
The issue of not sending a Beacon when the app is closed should be able to be resolved. We’re on the bleeding edge here with Apple and we’re basically trading fixes back and forth between iOS releases and Roomie releases. iBeacons have exploded in popularity since being a little known feature of iOS 7 on a slide last June so these things are getting ironed out.
Just consider the issue of not broadcasting a beacon when the app is not open as temporary for now. The alternative right now of course is to send beacons with a hardware beacon like Estimote although that really only makes sense in the room switching scenario.
Thank you.
I am using 3 Estimote iBeacons in three rooms. I have it working such that roomie switches to the correct room, but I can’t figure out how to program actions based on when I enter or exit the room with Estimotes. The proximity action panel does not show any synchronized devices for me to associate a command with a particular room. The activities are prefixed with room name. If I select from that list items for each room, will roomie execute the appropriate activities based on the room I am entering/exiting?
Thanks,
Rob
We noted in the FAQ that is not going to work. Detection of a device requires that device is listed in the Wi-Fi Synchronization Peers list. It doesn’t have to be there to detect it, but it does have to be there to set it up. We can change that but at the moment there really aren’t any use cases where we see people actually carrying iBeacons around (that are not their smartphone).
Thank you.
I guess I don’t understand. And maybe it can not be done at this stage. I want to be able to execute actions based on the room I am entering or exiting; using Estimotes which are permanently placed in each room. So, I walk into a room, my iPad, which I am carrying with me, picks up the Estimote and knows I am in the bedroom, so execute this series of actions (turn lights on, TV on, change channel, volume, etc…) and have the ability to do this discreetly so that a different set of actions can be triggered when leaving the room.
While in principle you could walk around with an active iPad with Roomie running on it, it’s not the general case. Estimotes are a good room beacon, but executing Proximity Detection requires an iOS device.
If/when we can get proximity actions to execute while the app is not active, we could enable the reverse behavior you’re talking about. The use case today is that the stationary iOS device executes the proximity actions (and likely also serves as the room beacon).
Thank you.
Hi guys
Our primary use case for using this Roomie proximity feature is having our iPhones (that we carry with us) with Roomie running on them, and moving from room to room and having Roomie automatically select the room as we enter the room. We are using Estimote iBeacons to sit in each of these rooms to help trigger this auto-switching. We use Roomie to help drive most of our home automation controls as well as audio/visual related activities, and are hoping these proximity features will help provide additional ease of use through the auto-switching. Just wanted to clarify the use case we are using at our place.
Keep up all of the great work!
My use case is generally the same as macjedi’s. I have stationery 3rd party I beacons in each room and use my iphone for control. Now I have the 3rd party ibeacons set up properly it all works pretty well except that the distance threshold for switching is too low for my room layouts. If it is possible to add the feature to tune that distance, it would significantly enhance this functionality for me.
^ 1+. Another use case where distance parameter needs tweaking. thanks.
I have a iPad mounted to the wall running roomie. If the iPad goes to sleep the beacon stops responding. Is there a setting for this?
Just picked up some Kontakt.io Beacons today. Wondering if there has been any movement on running actions when going near them?