Author: Support

Using Beacons, iBeacons for Asset Tracking

Tracking things and/or people makes organisations more efficient through enhanced productivity. Most organisations want to improve a specific problem in one of the following areas:

  • Stock Control – Knowing how much you have, where, without any human checking
  • Finding Items – Picking items without time-consuming manual searching
  • Safety & Security – Knowing when assets move, go missing, are dropped or crashed into
  • Process Efficiency – Preventing human error of manual audits, knowing an expensive asset is being fully utilised, providing real time workplace instructions

Having solved a problem, it’s often the case that the act of digitisation allows other problems to be identified and also solved.

There are many ways to track assets using beacons. Beacons can be put on assets and detected by smartphones, Bluetooth gateways, Bluetooth mesh, or other Bluetooth LE devices such as single board computers. Alternatively, beacons can be fixed and the detecting device(s) can move. Software can be in the detecting devices and/or at a server receiving data from the detecting devices. It’s also possible to use a real time locating system (RTLS) to map the positions of assets.

The optimum solution depends on your situation and requirements. Here are some aspects to think about that will determine the optimum solution:

  • What’s the size of area(s) and sub-areas (rooms, zones) you need to cover and is this outside?
  • What’s the physical makeup of the areas (walls, racking) and their composition?
  • What’s the electrical infrastructure (power, WiFi and Ethernet availability) and can this be upgraded?
  • What assets need to be tracked?
  • What attributes of assets need to be tracked (just location or sensor data as well?)
  • How many need to be tracked?
  • How many are in the same place, at the same time?
  • How often do the assets move?
  • How accurate do you need the locating?
  • How up to date do you need the tracking?
  • Who needs to do the tracking, from where?
  • How many people need to do the tracking simultaneously?
  • What kinds of information/report do you require and what’s the desired method of receiving?
  • What existing IT systems have to be integrated?

Contact us if you need help with a complete solution.

Read about Real Time Locating

Read about BeaconRTLS

Read about Asset Tracking for Manufacturers

Inside a Beacon – Part 1 – The Physical Beacon

This is part 1 of a 3 part series that explains what’s inside a beacon. In this part we take a look at the physical beacon.

All beacons are similar inside because they are based on standard circuit designs from Nordic Semiconductor, Dialog Semiconductor or Texas Instruments. These semiconductor manufacturers produce a complete system on a chip (SoC) that requires minimal external components. The SoC is a small computer with memory that runs software created by the manufacturer of the beacon. We will take a deeper look at the SoC in part 2 and the software in part 3.

For this series of articles we going to take a deeper look at Minew’s i7 beacon. It’s based on Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52832 SoC.

Minew i7

Inside the case is a PCB with a CR2477 slide in battery at the rear.

Inside the i7

The main chip you can see is the mRF52832. At the top you can also see the antenna that’s created using a track in the printed circuit board. The holes at the bottom right are connections used to program the beacon.

To understand more, we need to look at the printed circuit board design and circuit schematic:

i7 design
Circuit diagram – click to see larger in new window

It can be seen that there aren’t many external components. Y1, the metal component at the top is the crystal used to maintain timing. The SoC has a number of programmable input/output (PIO) pins that are multi-purpose. In a beacon some are usually connected to LEDs and a switch as shown at the left hand side of the circuit diagram. There are also capacitors that need to be external to the SoC.

U2, U3 and U4 are optional for this beacon and missing from this variant of the i7. U2 is the KX022-1020 accelerometer. U3 is the SHT31 temperature/humidity sensor. U4 is the BH1721 light sensor.

In part 2 we take a closer look at the nRF52 SoC.

Bluetooth Sensor Beacons For Prognostics

If you are considering using Bluetooth sensor beacons for prognostics, you should take a look at the free IEEE paper IoT-Based Prognostics and Systems Health Management for Industrial Applications (pdf).

Prognostics is the determination of health of assets to diagnose anomalous behaviour and predict the remaining useful life. It’s used to:

  • Prevent catastrophic failures
  • Increase asset availability through less downtime and less time wasted through ‘no fault found’ tests
  • Extend maintenance cycles
  • Execute timely repair

The overall aim is to lower lifecycle costs via fewer inspections, repairs and manual inspections. It can be applied to all types of assets across all sectors but is particularly applicable to manufacturing, industry and infrastructure. Infrastructure includes roads and ports as well as utility industries such as water, power and gas.

Prognostics and in-situ testing isn’t new. However, what is new is substantially improved viability and economics. New sensors, such as beacons, are easier to use, can be attached to legacy equipment and have much lower costs. The cost of connectivity and cloud storage is also decreasing. This means more assets can be retro-actively connected and the sharing of data across assets and platforms enables a more complete operating picture. This opens up new business opportunities.

The paper explains the four main types of prognostic management strategies: corrective, fixed-interval preventative, failure-finding, and condition-based maintenance (CBM). It also explains a new fusion approach to prognostics:

The paper gives examples of use of prognostics in the manufacturing, heavy industry, energy generation, transport & logistics, infrastructure assets, automobile, medical, warranty and robotic industries.

It ends with the mention that, in the future, current research and work on energy harvesting will benefit sensors used for prognostics.

More information:

Sensor Beacons
Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)
Using Bluetooth Wireless Sensors

Latest Nordic WirelessQ Magazine Available

Beacons are small computers with a complete System on a Chip (SoC). There are four main companies that manufacturer SoCs: TI, Dialog, NXP and Nordic. Nordic is the most popular SoC for use in beacons, mainly because of the lower (tool) license cost and ease for beacon manufacturers developing the software (actually called firmware) that runs in the beacons.

Nordic has a new free Wireless Quarter Magazine that showcases uses of Nordic SoCs in many types of device, not just beacons.

Learn about:

  • Gartner research showing sensor innovation fosters IoT growth
  • Beacons help U.S. shoppers find way
  • Bluetooth LE in Amazon FreeRTOS
  • Bluetooth LE smart textiles on the rise
  • Article combining Bluetooth Low Energy and LPWANs
  • Firmwave’s use of Bluetooth Low Energy beacons to build an inexpensive satellite broadcast system
  • Article on Getting started with Bluetooth mesh

Read more

New Minew G1 Bluetooth Gateway Video

Minew has a new video showcasing the G1:

The G1 gateway collects advertising data from iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth LE sensor and other Bluetooth LE devices and  sends it to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT/ using WiFi or Ethernet.

More information:

Available Gateways
Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)

Testing if a Beacon is Working

It’s often the case you need to know if a beacon is working and advertising the correct information. It’s also sometimes necessary to differentiate between beacons, based on their signal strength, so you know you are setting up the correct beacon. Other times, you might want to know a beacon’s MAC address.

The best scanning app is Nordic nRF Connect that’s written by the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in most beacons. Nordic nRF Connect detects all beacons and indeed all Bluetooth LE devices, irrespective of the SoC manufacturer because it just looks for standard Bluetooth advertising. nRF Connect is intelligent in that it works out the kind of beacon and displays the appropriate type of information.

It’s important you use the Android version of nRF Connect. Due to over-zealous efforts by Apple to hide identities, it’s not possible for iOS scanning applications to see advertising iBeacon (UUID, major and minor) information nor the Bluetooth MAC address.

Here’s an example scan:

In the above screenshot you can an iBeacon that has been tapped on to show extra information. All devices have the MAC address and a Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). The MAC address uniquely identifies the device.

Devices that scan for beacons will experience a signal strength (RSSI) that varies depending on the distance to the beacon. It’s expressed in dBm and is always negative. A more negative number indicates the beacon is further away. A typical value of -10 to -30 dBm indicates the beacon is close. A typical value of -110 indicates the beacon is near the limit of detection. You can use this to determine which beacons are closest. You usually configure beacons when they are right next to the phone and have a higher, less negative, RSSI.

nRF Connect also shows the advertising period that’s based on how often the app sees the advertising as opposed to what has been set in the beacon. The value is rarely exactly what you have set because Bluetooth requires some randomisation of the advertising period to reduce the possiblity of collisions between devices, in the vicinity, that are set to the same period. Also, being wireless, not all advertising is seen which causes jumps in the shown advertising period. Read more about choosing the advertising period.

There’s also a ‘RSSI at 1m’ which is the beacon’s self-declared value, in the advertising data, of what the RSSI should be at 1m. This can be used by scanning devices, such as apps, as a form of calibration for determining distance. In most cases this value isn’t used and should be ignored. Read more about power and the measured power calibration value.

Resurgence of Beacons in Retail

The demise of Google Nearby prompted some commentators to declare the death of beacons. However, here at BeaconZone we are actually seeing a resurgence of the use of beacons in retail.

Gone are the unsolicited notifications and gone are the ‘get rich quick’ marketers. The scenarios that remain tend to use beacons as an adjunct to something else rather than being the main solution itself. For example, they are used to provide triggering in CloseComm‘s WiFi onboarding app used by Subway, McDonalds, BurgerKing and CircleK and NCR.

Beacons are being rolled out to many food retailers, particularly in the USA. They are also taking new physical forms as witnessed by Mr Beacon:

If you are looking for more innovative uses of beacons in retail, take a look at Alibaba’s Fashion AI concept store as mentioned in the latest Wired (UK):

RFID and Beacons are used to detect items picked up during shopping so that customers can collect what they have looked at, have accessories automatically selected and view what’s in stock. Once they are home, a virtual wardrobe allows customers to buy anything they saw in store.

Beacons can also be used to enable audit compliance. Eric West, Head of Strategy at IMS has a useful free pdf on takeaways from GroceryShop, the retail industry conference. The pdf also mentions the use of beacons in lighting to drive location-based messages and wayfinding. Also:

“Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of WholeFoods was a “tipping point” that ensured all grocery players were speeding up their digital plans.”

Read about Beacons for Marketing

Wiliot To Enable New Beacon Usecases

We mentioned Wiliot last March and since then their R&D team has created early engineering samples that prove it’s possible to create a battery-less Bluetooth LE beacon harvesting energy from radio frequencies (RF).

The Wiliot device looks more like a RFID tag than a traditional beacon in that it’s supplied as a very thin PVC inlay sheet containing the chip and wire antenna together. The thin form factor, no battery and the relatively low cost will allow it to be manufactured into or stuck onto clothing and packaging that will provide for many new usecases.

Producing such a device isn’t easy as it can’t use existing System On a Chip (SoC) devices as produced by Nordic, Dialog and Texas Instruments (TI) because they are too large and use too much power. Wiliot has had to create their own SoC from the ground up, including software tools to develop and program the devices. We have been told it will be a year before Wilot has all the components in place for commercial rollout. Meanwhile, selected organisations can join the Early Advantage Program (EAP). There’s a new a product overview (PDF below) that explains the EAP and the main usecases, connected packaging, connected apparel, logistics and asset tracking:

Wiliot already have Early Advantage Program (EAP) agreements in place with over a dozen brands including top fashion brands, a telco, appliance companies, a furniture brand and packaging companies.

Machine Learning Accountability

AI machine learning is a great partner for sensor beacon data because it allows you to make sense of data that’s often complex and contains noise. Instead of difficult traditional filtering and algorithmic analysis of the data you train a model using existing data. The model is then used to detect, classify and predict. When training the model, machine learning can pick up on nuances of the data that a human programmer wouldn’t see by analysing the data.

One of the problems with the AI machine learning approach is that you use the resultant model but can’t look inside to see how it works. You can’t say why the model has classified something some way or why it has predicted something. This can make it difficult for us humans to trust the output or understand what the model was ‘thinking’ when the classifications or predictions end up being incorrect. It also makes it impossible to provide rationales in situations such as ‘right to know’ legislation or causation auditing.

A new way to solve this problem is use of what are known as counterfactuals. Every model has inputs, in our case sensor beacon data and perhaps additional contextual data. It’s possible to apply different values to inputs to find tipping points in the model. A simple example from acceleration xyz sensor data might be that a ‘falling’ indicator is based on z going over a certain value. Counterfactuals are generic statements that explain not how the model works but how it behaves. Recently, Google announced their What-If tool that can be used to derive such insights from TensorFlow models.

Read about Machine Learning and Beacons

Advertising Change Stream

If you work in IT and particularly if you have knowledge of programming, you will know it’s best to be informed of data rather than repeatedly request changes.

Repeatedly requesting changes, called polling, wastes resources when there’s no data returned. It also doesn’t get the data as soon it is available as you have to wait for the next poll.

A feature of our BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™ is that they offer change stream data on all database data. Change stream is a standard web (HTTP(S)) protocol that provides data to systems and apps as and when it becomes available. The client sets up a long running HTTP connection and then receives updates.

The stream looks something like:

First you get an ‘ok’ followed by data as and when it becomes available. The above only shows a generic iBeacon. When used with sensor beacons this also includes all decoded data such as movement, temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity (short range IR and PIR) and fall detection.

BeaconServer™ and BeaconRTLS™ provide REST based insert, update, query and change stream on all data allowing external systems and apps to fully use the system. This can also be authenticated via HTTP header tokens to prevent unauthorised access.

An example of use of the change stream is BeaconRTLS™ itself. The web UI uses the change stream to asynchronously update the UI with no flicker or redraw. All data, including beacons, locations and alerts are obtained asynchronously from the server (image below not live at it needs login):