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I'm starting to work with Bluetooth LE and iBeacons on iOS7.

I downloaded a little piece of code RFduino from OpenSourceRF.com to get the relative RSSI power of the beacon. This allows me to get a finest notion of proximity between the sender and the receiver then the default proximity callbacks.

I wondered if it was possible to have a notion of device orientation (the beacon is on the left) since iBeacons uses CoreLocation.

Thanks for your help.

Raptor
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Khal
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1 Answers1

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iOS CoreLocation simply uses the RSSI measurement to estimate distance. See an explanation of how this works here.

This technique does not allow a directional estimate, because the signal strength generally declines in proportion to the distance from the beacon in any direction. Unless you have multiple iBeacon in the same spot with unidirectional antennas, I do not think there is any way to estimate direction. To my knowledge nobody makes unidirectional Bluetooth antennas.

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davidgyoung
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