Evothing Estimote Beacon Plugin - Ranging Anomoly on Android 5.0

[rohail]

Hey

We have been using evothing's phonegap plugin for estimote beacons in one of our projects. We started our project using version 0.6.0 till recently when we upgraded the plugin to version 0.7.1 .

Previous version of the plugin was causing our app to fatally crash when we try to start beacon ranging on any Android 5.0 (Lollypop) devices. It was working perfectly for other android i.e. 4.3 , 4.4.2 devices. We were getting all the beacon during beacon ranging . In our app, beacon ranging is done for a duration of 3 seconds and it is repeated after every 5 second. During each interval we get the beacons.

After updating to newer version (0.7.1) our app didn't crash on Android 5.0 but we have detected that the behaviour of beacon ranging was very different from what we use to have. Currently when beacon ranging is started , it runs for 10 seconds giving us the beacons in vicinity and then it automatically stop for random amount of time. Time varies from 30seconds to over 5+ minutes.

Is there any new configuration or settings that we are missing ?
Has there been any change in the core functionality of Estimote SDK that could have caused new beacon ranging behaviour ?
Is there any way we can achieve the same beacon ranging functionality on this version of plugin ?

We are at a very critical stage of this project in which your plugin is play a very crucial part and your immediate help would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

[micke]

Hi, thanks for reporting this.

The problem might be solved by updating the Estimote Android library. This library is used by the plugin. Did a search and a new library was released just three days ago: https://github.com/Estimote/Android-SDK/releases Updating does however involve some work since the new library is in the form of an AAR file (not a jar file, which is needed by the plugin).

It might also be that the Android library scans for some time then, makes a pause and then restarts the scan. This is a way to address problems with some Android devices not reporting devices multiple times per scan. Not sure if this is the case for you.

You could experiment with editing the plugin source file EstimoteBeacons.java and add calls to configure the scan period:

https://github.com/evothings/phonegap-e ... acons.java

Here are methods to try:

http://estimote.github.io/Android-SDK/J ... %20long%29
http://estimote.github.io/Android-SDK/J ... %20long%29

Is it possible for you to run adb locat and inspect the console log? Perhaps there are some clues there to what is going on?

Hope this can be of some help. We will look into updating the plugin, but I cannot say when this will happen.

Regards, Mikael