Drive-by beacons?

[awneil]

Is BLE communication possible between a fixed beacon & moving "reader" on a vehicle.

At speeds up to, say, 60mph (97km/h; 27m/s) ?

[Anders Strand]

Hey!

This is possible, but your success rate is a pure statistical calculation. I will try to give you some input to base your decision on.

At 27 m/s velocity, let us assume that you are within BLE range for 1 second. If the beacon broadcasts at 1000 ms intervals, you might pick up this broadcast. This is assuming that your scanner is on 100% of the time. The scanner must switch between 3 broadcast channels, so it will be down in short pauses ever so often. This means that broadcasting once a second will probably not work. Broadcasting twice a second doubles your chances, but there is still a chance to not pick up the broadcast.

So this purely comes down to broadcast interval, and scan interval. These two must overlap at some point during the one second you are in range. If we assume 100% scan uptime, i would guesstimate that 3 or 4 broadcasts/second will work. I think the only way to know this is to test it. You might have interference from the car or other devices which impacts your results.

If you are buying pre-made beacons, i would assume that this will not work. This is because a normal beacon broadcast interval is about 1000 ms or more.