Bluetooth MAC to Sigfox

[Cedric]

We're looking to scan periodically in the device proximity:

• Bluetooth-enabled devices (e.g., every 60 seconds) .
• Wifi-enabled devices (e.g., every 30min).
  In each case the scanned results includes MAC addresses of the Bluetooth or wifi access point and the corresponding scanning time stamps.
  Then scanned result are send through Sigfox

Can we do that with a LoPy4?
Did your here about similar application already developed?

[jcaron]

@Cedric What's your use case? A tracker using BLE/WiFi instead of GPS? I suppose you want it to be battery powered? How long do you need it to last on batteries? Such a scheme would probably be quite power-hungry.

Another (and probably more important) issue is bandwidth. The Sigfox payload is limited to 12 bytes per message and 140 messages per day. A BLE or WiFi MAC is 6 bytes, so you can send only 2 at a time (without any other info such as timestamp, which is probably not very useful anyway, or signal strength or anything).

At best you can send 2 MAC addresses every 600 seconds (10 minutes) on average.

It's common to have dozens of WiFi networks and BLE devices in range in dense areas, so either you need to filter out what you want to send, or it may take a while to send all of them and your update frequency will be much much lower than every 60 seconds.

So yes, you can capture BLE and WiFi MAC addresses and send them over Sigfox, but there are inherent limits which may make it not worthwhile.