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I know nexus 7's have bluetooth 4.0 but what I was wondering if you could use bluetooth 4.0 LE to calculate the distance between two devices? I want a very accurate distance calculator between two devices. I asked earlier about an android and an iphone but I am now only concerned with 2 android devices.

Chevy Hungerford
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No. Bluetooth LE isn't some kind of magic hi-res GPS, it's basically just bluetooth data transfer using lower-powered transmitters.

Distance to the other device affects signal strength, but so do a bunch of other things. It's like trying to use a WiFi signal analyzer to measure the distance to a wifi hotspot. (Try it. You won't have much success!)

Look at the rather over-hyped Hone Keyfinder: The only thing it can tell you is if you're getting closer or further away from your keys. The keys don't know where the phone is, and the phone doesn't know where the keys are.

iBeacon works by having beacons at fixed lat/long, with a low-power transmitter. They broadcast their lat/long, so if you're in range of one, you know where you are. If you have enough beacons near you, you can triangulate based on relative signal strength. iOS devices acting as 'beacons' only makes sense if somehow they have better GPS coverage than you do.

Roddy
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  • Here is what I am thinking about doing. I am changing all of the names of the devices to be a session name. I am going to tell the devices to only interact with the same session name. What I need is to tell if two devices are touching, going to try to base this of a narrow range of RSSI values. Based off of this, it will send information to a server that says these two devices interacted with each other at this certain time. Make sense? Any thoughts? – Chevy Hungerford Jan 07 '14 at 05:57
  • If you want to tell if they're touching, use NFC. Via Bluetooth LE, you can maybe tell if its in the same room. Read the conclusion here: http://www.intechopen.com/books/emerging-communications-for-wireless-sensor-networks/indoor-location-tracking-using-received-signal-strength-indicator – Roddy Jan 07 '14 at 09:26
  • I cannot use NFC because it needs to be compatible with iPhone devices. – Chevy Hungerford Jan 07 '14 at 17:36