The Positioning Settings screen is divided in two areas: Basic Settings and Advanced Settings. It is important to take into account that any modification of the Positioning Settings will require to re-start the positioning.
Basic Settings
The Basic Settings are always shown by default. Please use the following table as a reference.
| Settings | Description | Recommendation | Useful links | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Use WIFI for location | Use WIFI for Indoor Location. | Enabled | Situm Indoor Mode | ||
| Use BLE for location | Use BLE for Indoor Location. | Enabled | Situm Indoor Mode | ||
| Use GPS for indoor location | Use GPS for Indoor Location | Enable it if your building has big outdoor areas (with good GPS coverage) within the floorplan boundaries. | Calibrated and Uncalibrated Indoor GPS Mode | ||
| Enable indoor/outdoor location | Enables the Global Mode, that allows to compute both Indoor & Outdoor geolocations. | Enable it if you want to provide positioning in more than one building or anywhere in the world (outdoors). | Building vs Global mode in Situm Mapping Tool Building vs Global Mode | ||
| Continuous Mode | If enabled, and if the Open Sky Detector (see below) is enabled, scans the GPS continuously. Otherwise, the Open Sky Detector scans the GPS every 5-10 seconds. | Do not enable unless you want the Open Sky Detector to detect transitions very quickly. Drains the smartphone battery quickly. | Open Sky Detector | ||
| GPS scan interval | Allows to define the GPS scan interval (in seconds) for when the Continous Mode is enabled. | Adjust to the maximum time that you tolerate to perform a open sky to under roof (or viceversa) transition. | Open Sky Detector | ||
| Open Sky Detector | If enabled, is able to detect whether the user is under roof or under open sky. | Do not enable, feature not recommended. Use the Global Mode with an appropriate Building Detector instead. | Open Sky Detector | ||
| Advanced Global Location Detection Config | SNR value of the GPS above which the user will be considered to be under the open sky (the higher the SNR, the better the GPS signal and therefore the higher the chance that the user is under open sky) | Measure the SNR at the transitions (between open sky and under roof) to adjust it. | Open Sky Detector | ||
| Building Detector | Detects (automatically) the building where the user is. 4 detectors available: 1. GPS proximity:you are in the closest building to your GPS location. 2. WiFi and BLE:you are in the building whose WiFi and BLE signals (gathered from calibrations) match better the WiFi and BLE signals perceived by your smartphone 3. WIFI: similar, but using WIFI only. 4. BLE: similar, but using BLE only. | WIFI and BLE detector is recommended in most cases. | Building detectors | ||
The following figure contains an overview of the settings as shown in Situm Mapping Tool.
Advanced Settings
The Advanced Settings will be displayed if you click on the "Advanced Settings" drawer.
| Settings | Description | Recommendation | Useful Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Use camera for Indoor Location | If enabled, uses Google AR Core to estimate the user movement (as an alternative to the use of the inertial sensors for the same purpose). | Enable it only for testing purposes. Your phone must be compatible with AR Core. | ||
| Interval to upload locations to Realtime | Allows to control the frequency with which the computed geolocations will be sent to Situm cloud. | Use REALTIME (1s) if you want to receive the geolocation in Situm Platform (and visualize it in the Real Time panel) as soon as they are generated. Otherwise, you may reduce the frequency (the more you reduce, the bigger the battery savings). Use NEVER if you do not want to store any geolocation in Situm Platform. | Battery saving Real-time monitoring | |
| Use a foreground service | If enabled, prevents the positioning from being stopped (by Android) when the app is in the background | Use if you want to track the smartphone even if the app is in the background. | Background tracking in Android | |
| Use locations cache | When the positioning stops, this mode saves the last location. When the positioning starts again, it uses the last location (stored) as a hint on where the user might be. | Enable if your app stops & starts the positioning frequently (e.g. if your app stops the positioning when it goes to the background and starts it when it comes back to the foreground). This option will improve the user experience in this case. | ||
| Ignore the WiFi throttling during the positioning in Android 10 | If enabled, Situm will scan WiFi as fast as possible, ignoring all the Android 10+ WiFi Throttling restrictions. | Always enable it in Android 10+. Make sure that you have deactivated the WiFi Throttling | Desactivate WiFi Throttling in Android 10+ | |
| Use gyro for location | Uses gyroscope to estimate the user movement (particullarly, the orientation). | Enable it always. Disable only for testing purposes. | Orientation estimation | |
| Use compass for location | Uses compass to estimate the user orientation. | Enable it always. Disable only for testing purposes, if the compass is uncalibrated or if the environment interferences are harming the positioning accuracy. | Compass calibration How to detect an uncalibrated compass | |
| Use barometer for location | Use the barometer to estimate whether the smartphone is moving upwards (to the upper floors of the building) or downwards (to the lower floors). Speeds up the floor changes. | Enable it always if your phone should has barometer sensor. It will speed up the floor changes. | How to speed up floor changes Floor changes accelerators | |
| Activate Bluetooth automatically | When enabled, if you turn off the Bluetooth in your device, Situm Mapping Tool will re-enable it again in order to read Bluetooth data. | Enable it if you want to use BLE for location (option "Use BLE for location" is enabled) | ||
| Prioritize indoor positions over indoor-outdoor | ||||
| Update locations interval | Time (in seconds) between consecutive location updates. This option does not affect the frequency with which location updates are calculated. It only affects the frequency with which they are communicated to the app, and therefore rendered by the GUI | We recommend the default value (1 second), which is also the fastest available. This will provide the best user experience. Change it only if you want to test how the user experience will look like by rendering fewer location updates. | ||
| Location updates smallest displacement | Smallest displacement required (in meters) between consecutive location updates. After one location is communicated to the app, a new one will only be communicated if the user moves more than this value. Therefore, the user location will stall in the GUI until this minimum displacement takes place. Changing this value will not change the number of locations computed and therefore will not vary the battery consumption. | We recommend the default value (0 meters), which is also the fastest available. This will provide the best user experience. However, some users may find the default value a bit jumpy: the smallest displacement will be rendered, even random ones. This option may be handy for those users. | ||
| Battery saver | If enabled, Situm will read the accelerometer data to decide whether the smartphone is moving or has been laying still for a while. In this latter case, most computation will stop (including reading sensor data) and the last known location will be repeatedly communicated to the app (and sent to the cloud, if the Update locations interval allows it). If the smartphone moves again, normal operation will be restored. | Enable it only if:
| Battery Saver section in Battery Efficiency post | |
| Dead Reckoning | Requires "Update locations interval" = 1 second. If enabled, Situm will calculate:
New locations will be communicated to the app every 100 milliseconds, although these subsecond locations will only account for orientation changes (position will be "repeated" until the next position update). | Enable always for a better user experience in wayfinding applications. | ||
| Start the positioning when the app starts | If enabled, the positioning will start automatically when the app starts, in the building selected in the option "Select the building you want to start the positioning" | Not recommended in general. Use this option only for tracking applications where you want to make sure that the app always starts in a certain building, without user intervention. | ||
| Select the building you want to start the positioning | Allows you to select the building where the positioning will start (automatically) if you enable the option "Start the positioning when the app starts" | |||
