The Talking Llama

We’re getting closer to the Recording Britain opening at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery on 3rd April (preview 2nd April). We were able to have a few hours in the gallery testing out the beacon placement for the app (even though as you can see, the paintings have yet to be installed!). It is a single large space, which isn’t perhaps the best setting for a beacon demo but it worked pretty well. We weren’t unable to put the beacons on the ceiling as we had hoped (see the Where to Position Your Beacons post), so we have ended up with a couple of areas where the beacons interfere slightly with each other.

We were a little worried about how easily the beacons would attached to the walls and panels but the results were encouraging. They seemed very firmly fixed on, and when we needed to move them they didn’t take a load of paint with them.

In this demo we have positioned four Estimote beacons on the ceiling of our office to create four zones. We have developed an iPhone app to determine the current zone we are in based on the received signal strength from the beacons.

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Where do we stick our beacons? I haven’t heard any (sensible) suggestions that answer this. Instinctively it felt right to place them on walls at just a little over the height of a person. This way they would be high enough to be clear of obstructions, and low enough to still give out a strong signal. We now think that this is wrong and the best position is probably going to be on the ceiling.

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We have carried out a series of experiments in which we have positioned beacons around a room and measured the received signal strength and the distance measurement from Estimote’s SDK at specific points in the room. We have compared these measurements with the actual distances at each position.

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