Main screens

Main screens are all screens that can be reached without actually connecting to a tracker. User can navigate between them by pressing the menu icon in the top left corner or swiping right from the left side of the screen.

These screens are:

• Device list

• Demo devices

• Application settings

• About

Device list

This is the first screen user will see when launching the aplication from stopped state. It provides the ability to use BLE to scan for all suitable devices that are in close proximity. BLE scan is started automatically when user navigates to this screen. Scan can be started or stopped by touching the text in the top right.

Below the header is the list of devices that were found by the phone. The list is updated in real time (new devices are added and data for existing ones is updated), application does this every 3 seconds. It can also be refreshed (cleared) with swipping down from the top of the list, which also restarts the BLE scan. Application will stop scanning after 60 seconds and user needs to restart the scan if he wants to continue searching for devices.

App displays only those devices that advertise a specific service (by checking it's UUID) and match user defined filters for name and MAC address. When there aren't any devices to be seen, text displaying information about filters is shown (if any user defined ones are currently used or not).

In order to be seen, device needs to advertise a service with the following UUID: 84AA6074-528A-8B86-D34C-B71D1DDC538D. This additional filter was added to the app for security and performance reasons and is hardcoded into the app.

Name and MAC filters can be edited or removed in application settings. If name filters are defined, the device's name needs to contain any of the string values. If MAC filters are defined, device's MAC address needs to match any of the string values.

Each device in the list is presented by an icon of an animal or an asset, showing which type of a device it is. In the middle is the device's name and MAC address, if there is a lock next to the name, that device is locked and user will require to enter PIN when connecting to it. On the right is signal strength (RSSI) value with a text below indicating to the user if it's possible or not possible to connect to this device. App determines this by using hysteresis on the RSSI value with set tresholds, which limits failing connection attempts because of poor signal quality. The limit is set to -80 dBm, with a 5 dBm window.

Below basic information is the status data that is being advertised, which gives the user a quick overview of device's state. Available values are: battery state and voltage, hardware version, firmware version, accelerometer data, temperature and error information of main functions, such as LoRa, GPS or flash chips states.

Demo devices

This feature has not yet been implemented. Currently, it just lists all available tracker types.

It will offer ability to use and test all app features that are otherwise available only if the user has an actual tracker available. There will be a list of dummy trackers of all types with fake data. User will be able to tap on one and the application will show all the screens in the same way as if it's connected to a real device with all fields filled with sample data. This way user will see which features each tracker type provides and which ones can be changed.

Application settings

User can change various parameters of the application. Settings are encoded as a JSON object, offering ability to import/export them from/to a file. User can use a reset button to return all settings to their default values.

Currently available settings are described below.

Scan results filtering

Results returned from BLE scan can be filtered by name or MAC address. Multiple values can be added for each of them, they need to be separated with commas. If no values are written in names or MACs array fields, all devices will be returned, same as if device_filter property is removed. When scan returns the result (found a device), the name filter is checked first. If result doesn't match any name filters, MAC address is checked.

About

Here one can read basic description about the application and Open Collar collaboration. It also features Smart Parks and IRNAS as the creators of it.