BLE Beacons

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hi guys, I was wondering if I could get some advice on an upcoming project.

The main goal of the project is to use a series of ble beacons and use an arduino to transmit data about the beacons to a laptop via bluetooth.

Basically I want the Arduino to constantly send individual proximity information about each beacon to a laptop via a bluetooth module in real time.

The beacons will be in a fixed position and will most likely be 1-5 meters max away from the arduino at all times. The Arduino will be moved around and I want to track each individual beacon's proximity to the Arduino and send that to the laptop via the bluetooth module attached to the Arduino.

Is this something that can work? and if so is there anything important that I will need to consider?

2

Only one beacon can send a signal at a time, at the same channel, a mix of signals can not be received.

You'll need a receiver module that can not only report reception yes/no of a beacon signal, but also the RF signal level. Tune the beacon senders to produce an output signal, whose level degrades perceivably within the distance of two beacons. You can not calculate position information, if all beacon signals are received perfectly across the entire area.

You can start with a single beacon, and try to derive the distance of the receiver from the reported signal level. You'll find out that the dependency between signal level and distance is not linear, it will be quadratic or cubic instead.