Asset tracking super inaccurate in messy environment, help?
Posted by General_Occasion_397@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 1 comments
Have you dealt with your RTLS system being inaccurate in high-density environments?
We use these custom hardware from Europe, and location data are always just kinda spotty with its bluetooth RSSI values, and maybe some interference of the signal going from bluetooth beacon to gateway?
Is there a hardware-level calibration I’m overlooking, or is the software logic always the bottleneck?
omglazrgunpewpew@reddit
Yeeeeeah, Bluetooth RSSI in a high-density environment is far less "precise location system” and way more “cartography color by numbers”.
Maybe you have metal racks or people moving about? Walls and stacked equipment can certainly affect. Plus beacon orientation, gateway placement, and whatever the building was constructed out of in 1987 can all futz with the signal. So first figure out whether the raw signal data is actually usable before we go telling the app logic it sux.
Do a boring, but useful, walk test. Grab a few tags, put them in known spots, log raw RSSI from each gateway, and see if the readings are at least consistently wrong. Consistently wrong is fixable. Randomly wrong is heading to the void, and we don't want to go there.
If raw RSSI is chaotic, hardware placement/calibration may help, but it prob won’t magically become surgical. If raw readings are fairly sane but the displayed location is garbage, then the software/filtering logic should be checked.
Also worth finding out if tags are just getting “claimed” by the loudest gateway. That’s an easy way to make an asset appear three rooms over because one gateway yelled the loudest.
RSSI can work, but in messy env it needs a lot of adult supervision.