00 – Situm quickstart guide

Situm is an indoor and outdoor positioning platform that makes easy to introduce wayfinding & tracking applications in your business. To get it up and running is really simple. A brief step-by-step explanation can be found below:

Register and create your building #

1. Create an account in Situm Dashboard. More info here.
2. Create a building in your account.
3. Upload the floorplans of your building in PNG format.
   1. Recommended format: PNG or JPG by default. We also support raster tiles, vector maps and 3D geojson with IMDF format. If you are interested in these formats please contact sales@situm.com.
   2. Max resolution is 4096×4096 pixels.
   3. Different floors should be of same sized and properly aligned (e.g. building outer walls should be in the same relative position across floors). More info.

Remember: If your building has several floors, the png files must have the same resolution (max 4096 *4096 px).

Calibrate your building #

In order to deploy Situm technology, you will calibrate the building: this consists on recording the WiFi / BLE signals that Situm needs to operate. For the sake of simplicity, we assume that you will try out only Android and WiFi positioning.

• Download Situm Mapping Tool for Android.
• Android and IOS devices limit WiFi scanning, but on Android it can be removed. Look for the Wifi-Throttling section on your model in the following guide.
• Make sure you record at least WiFi.
• Go to the Calibration screen.
• Calibrate all the areas where you want positioning to work. Make sure to:
  • Pinpoint where you are from time to time: at least in every turn, every recognizable point, every few dozen meters.
  • Don’t run!
  • More tips here.

If everything went well, you should be able to visualize your calibration data and the positioning model should be generated.

Remember: Calibrate all the areas where you want positioning to work

Try out indoor positioning #

Now, you may try how indoor positioning works in your building.

• Go to the Settings/Positioning menu (1) and configure it as shown below (2).
• Go to the Positioning Screen, select your building and click on the Start Positioning button (3)

(Optional) Deploy beacons & re-calibrate #

Other than WiFi, Situm can use the signal of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices. This is required to try out Situm with iOS devices, or to enhance the experience in Android devices (e.g. areas with poor WiFi coverage).

If you want to test Situm with beacons:

• First, deploy the beacons following this How To Guide.
• Second, configure your beacons UUIDs in Situm Dashboard, so that Situm SDKs & apps are able to scan your beacons.
• Finally, re-calibrate your building, but make sure you record BLE as well as WiFi.

Important: In this tutorial, we have deployed the beacons after the first WiFi calibration. This was just for the sake of going from more easy to more complex. Usually, you will want to deploy the beacons before the first calibration with WiFi. This way, you can calibrate WiFi & BLE all at once.