I recently bought these boards , SparkFun NanoBeacon Board - IN100 and SparkFun NanoBeacon Lite Board - IN100 and the tutorial and demo worked fine , however for the range I am only getting about 10-12 ft. I made the changes on the second board as suggested in the tutorial:
in the “XO” option under “Global Settings”. First, changing the Internal Capacitor Code from 8 to 11 can add roughly 5-10dB performance which can help increase the range of the IN100. Second, changing the Strength Code from 16 to 19 should also help with overall performance.
but it did not help much, was curious what you folks observed ? I did see digikey sells the inplay eval kit which looks like it has a connection for a antenna and was wondering if that might help ?
that was my question - what range did the SF folks see during their testing ? btw I could not find range info in the link you listed, did you see it somewhere ? thanks
Hi there! In my testing with my phone, I’m usually able to get ~100ft line of sight from the NanoBeacon boards. I still get data from ~100ft to ~150ft, but the packet loss becomes significant. After ~150ft is too far for my phone to receive data. You can definitely get a lot more range with an external antenna, such as InPlay’s evaluation kit, but we chose to to stick with a PCB trace antenna to keep the small form factor and help lower the cost.
Keep in mind that with radio waves, signals can be attenuated or blocked quite easily. If you’re only getting ~10ft of range, make sure to keep the NanoBeacon away from any surfaces, hands,
and especially metal. Also make sure there’s line of sight between the beacon and your receiver.
If you’re still having short range, would you mind sending a photo of your setup while you’re making measurements, and what you’re using to measure? That’d help give us better context so we can provide better assistance!
attached are two pics, one of the SF boards and the other of the BLE scanner. for this test I moved the SF board away from my laptop in an open room facing a hallway. at 20 ft the RSSI is around 88-90 and once I get further than that the rssi > 95 it stops getting data from the BMA400 sensor.
I also tried the SF sample code on a ESP32 but get the same range results.
Thanks for the photos! Hmm, nothing seems obviously wrong to me, that’s pretty much the same as my setup.
I just tested this again, and at ~20ft, my RSSI is approximately -70dB. Going to the end of a ~120ft hallway, the RSSI gets below -90dB and I start getting packet loss (still getting packets though).
I tested both with my phone (Galaxy Note 9) running InPlay’s scanner app, and with an ESP32 IoT RedBoard running the sketch linked in the hookup guide. I was actually getting slightly better RSSI from the ESP32 (roughly 5dB better), but still comparable to each other.
When you’re testing, is your beacon sitting on a table? Your image shows it on a wooden surface; I don’t think that would affect it significantly, but it’s possible. For reference, when I was testing in the hallway, I had my beacon suspended in the air away from any surfaces. If I put the beacon on the floor, the RSSI dropped by about 20dB, and I had full packet loss about half way down the hallway.
Another thing to experiment with is the orientation of the beacon. I’ve found that the receiver gets the best signal strength when it’s on the left side of the beacon, and the worst signal strength is when the received is on the “south” side (eg. the battery is blocking the antenna).
If none of this helps, it’s also possible that particular board is defective. Do you happen to have a second one that you can use to compare?
It was sitting on a wooden cabinet about 4 ft off the floor. I will try changing the orientation and see if that helps. I also ordered and received the inplay dev board, very similar to the SF one but also adds a small antenna. It improved slightly to 25-30ft. I don’t think the SF board is defective.
Next test is to take it outside, hopefully free of any interference and will report back those results. Thanks for all the suggestions.
Woah, only ~30ft with an external antenna? Something is fishy about that! Since you’re getting such low range with both boards, I agree that the SF board is probably not defective, something else seems wrong.
Since you’re seeing such low RSSI, I don’t think the problem is from interference from other devices transmitting; that would cause packet loss, but not lower the RSSI. That’s usually more indicative of problems like bad orientation, or attenuating materials between the beacon and receiver, or a bad receiver. But sounds like you’ve addressed these, so I’m not sure what else to try unfortunately. I will let you know if I have any more suggestions. Also please follow up if you have more success in your testing!
I had a chance to take it outdoors today. I placed the IN100 on top of a plastic trash can about 4ft high facing up. Best I could get was about 35 ft before the RSSI went > 92 and the BLE scanner app lost it.
Curious - Were you using the SF github bma400_data.cfg file in your demo ?
