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I got this code from google code :

void QBluetoothDeviceDiscoveryAgent::deviceDiscovered(const QBluetoothDeviceInfo &info)
QBluetoothDeviceInfo::rssi().

But how to get rssi distance from `QBluetoothServiceDiscoveryAgent ? I tried with QBluetoothServiceDiscoveryAgent serviceInfo; quint i =serviceInfo.device().rssi();

here i = -43

how to convert it to distance? I got the link Understanding ibeacon distancing but how to get the transmitter power? to calculate the distance according to formula?

chinmay
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1 Answers1

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Make sure you understood the implications of QBluetoothDeviceInfo::rssi(). Calling this functions returns immediately with the last stored value when the device was scanned last. If you only receive one advertisement-packet, which happens to be at e.x. -90dB, and then immediately connect, this function will keep returning -90 until you disconnect from it and scan it again. Connected devices usually don't send advertisement-packets so the RSSI you can read via Qt won't be updated during the connection.

As for proximity, it's not so easy to get good values. To accurately convert from RSSI to geometric distance you must know the sender's original/intended signal-strength (or TX-power-level == RSSI at 1m distance). This value will differ between devices. To make things worse, in practice it can also vary by a huge margin depending on things like the sender's battery-level, physical orientations of sender/receiver to eachother, quality of individual parts, random interference from other RF devices....

The BLE-folk has a blog explaining how you should do it. You can read it up here. The linked article doesn't read or assume the theoretical maximum RSSI of the sender but instead it propoposes to gather multiple RSSI-values over time (+ do some mean/mode filtering), and use the current mean-value in comparison with the previous value to determine if you are approaching or moving away from the sender. Paired with some fine-tuning using real-world data you gotta collect, plus documentation-reading and common-sense, you could probably develop a proximity calculation for many or even most sender-devices which would be accurate to about one meter or even less at close proximity. In the end it's a tradeoff between how many devices you wish to 'calibrate' for and those you are okay with having shifted values due to higher or lower TX-power-levels.

The downside being - you can't test for every possible device on the market and as I said earlier, different devices have different TX-power-levels. With this approach you can develop an algorithm to get pretty good measurements for devices which have approximately equal signal-configurations but others will seem far off. The article's author talks about creating different profiles for different vendors but that's not really gonna help (consider two identical beacons ("big/small"), one for large and one for small indoor locations - with RSSI alone you can't reliably determine if you're close to the small beacon or in medium range to the big one unless they identify themselves via GAP or otherwise (forget MAC-addresses if you plan to deploy on MacOS or iOS).

Also, prepare yourself for the joyride that is Android BLE development. Some vendors know that their BLE implementation is so terribly bad and broken, they even disabled the HCI-Logging-Feature on all their ROMs to hide it. Others can be BLE-nuked like Win98 by ethernet, back in the days.

Dip Hasan
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markus-nm
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