iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
We have the new ABSensor N03 in stock, a sensor beacon advertising temperature, humidity and light level.
This beacon has excellent mounting options including a magnet on back, undrilled holes on back, mount holes on side flanges and an included sticker:
Google announced yesterday that they are discontinuing support for Android Nearby Notifications. This is due to:
“a significant increase in locally irrelevant and spammy notifications that were leading to a poor user experience”
This means that anything mentioning the Physical Web, Eddystone-URL or Nearby notifications will no longer work. While beacons can still send out URLs, you will need an app to see the URL and you might as well use Eddystone-UID or iBeacon instead.
It’s disappointing that this mechanism will be turned off on December 6th, 2018. Unfortunately, it attracted use for more nefarious purposes and also resulted in some subscription schemes of dubious value. It’s especially bad news for those people using Nearby notifications legitimately and those companies that have built up platforms and businesses around Nearby notifications.
The Nearby API still works for apps and Google still supports the Proximity beacon API. With or without this API, it’s still possible to create beacon triggered notifications in iOS and Android apps using the Bluetooth APIs. What’s no longer possible is unsolicited, app-less notifications.
We will be updating BeaconZone documents, blog posts and articles over the next few days. EddystoneCMS will be retired.
We have been doing a survey of app store reviews of manufacturer apps used to configure beacons. Not just for beacons we sell, but for the whole industry. It’s interesting to note that there are no apps with consistently high ratings scores, on iOS nor Android. Over time, most apps seem to to gravitate towards a mediocre rating. Why?
The problems are that a) Bluetooth is wireless and hence can’t guarantee 100% reliability, all the time b) People have different technical aptitudes and some blame the software when the real cause is that they didn’t understand (or read!) c) Some phones have bugs in their Bluetooth stacks (in-built Bluetooth software).
Hence, no matter how good the app, it will end up having a number of negative reviews.
It’s often the case that rolling out beacons for a particular purpose allows them to be put to other unrelated uses. Take, for example, one of our customers, a hospital, who wanted to roll out a network of beacons to allow wayfinding by patients.
Beyond this initial remit, having beacons placed along corridors allowed them to be re-used for asset tracking. Also, the data from both will allow people and asset movement to be monitored to work out choke points as well as ‘wasted’ areas where nothing happens.
If you think wider than your initial requirement it’s often possible to find extra usecases and identify extra stakeholders who might even be able to help cross-fund the initial requirement.
Update: Just after we wrote this, we became aware, via Mr Beacon, that SNCF have a competition to make best use of their beacon network.
We have the new Minew E2 PA in stock. It’s a waterproof beacon advertising iBeacon and Eddystone.
What’s special about this beacon is the 10+ year battery life that comes through using the power efficient Nordic nRF52 SoC and 4 AA batteries. The in-use battery life will depend on settings.
This beacon also has a power amplifier that provides for an exceptional range of up to 500m. However, as with any long range beacon, the maximum range is achieved only when there’s line of sight.
We have the new Minew S1 in stock. It’s a sensor beacon with accelerometer, temperature and humidity as well as iBeacon/Eddystone. Unusually for a temperature/humidity beacon it is waterproof to IP65 making it suitable for use outdoors. Sensor beacons like this usually have the sensor on the PCB and a hole in the case to pass through ambient temperature and humidity. Instead, the sensor is outside the beacon:
This beacon takes 2 AAA batteries and uses a newer, more efficient Nordic nRF52 System on a Chip (SoC) for a long 3 year battery life.
There’s a useful new post on the Nordic blog on Partnerships & Ecosystems for Industrial IoT. Nordic is the manufacturer of the System-on-a Chip (SoC) in most beacons and Lorenzo is one of their Business Development Managers.
The blog post makes the case for companies not to try to go it alone. The newness and complexity of technologies is such that it’s unlikely you have the skills in-house. What’s more, you
“won’t know what you don’t know”
We have found that it’s often the case with organisations taking up our consultancy, that they ask particular questions when their real problems are somewhere else. They are oblivious to the unknown unknowns.
Another common situation we come across is companies setting off in the wrong direction, doing lots of work and realising it doesn’t work. They contact us for quick fix but sometimes one doesn’t exist. Once you get in deep, it can be hard to pull out and even when things partially work you can end up with long term problems due to poor initial decisions.
The Nordic blog post advocates finding partners. One thing we have found is not to partner with anyone and everyone, at any cost. Only partner when there’s a clear synergy. Be clear whether you really will be a partner or customer. Although there can be some overlap, some unscrupulous companies use partnership as a guise for selling.
We have the new Minew G1 gateway in stock. 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.
Special features of this gateway are that that it supports both WiFi and Ethernet and has a high throughput of up to 200 Bluetooth LE devices detected per second.
We have a selection of beacons that are powered from USB. However, up until now, very few of them have been controllable via USB.
We now stock the Minew U1 that has a CP2104 USB Serial converter that causes the device to show as a serial COM port device. This allows you to control it from other devices such as PCs, laptops, Linux or Android, as well as from the iOS/Android apps.
Why might you want to do this? Scenarios such as use with digital signage and video walls in shopping malls and stadiums sometimes need the beacon advertising to change in real-time as the display information changes. UART connected beacons allows the beacon advertising to be changed by the host device.
ABI Research predicts that there’s going to be an increase in beacon-enabled app shipments mainly due to retail and ambient intelligence:
So what is ambient intelligence? It’s a catch all term for the joining of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, the connected home, wearables, smartphones, voice/image recognition and artificial intelligence through machine learning.
Sensor beacons enable the gathering of new data. New data not only measures physical things but, more importantly, provides a way of circumventing the problem of silo data in many large organisations. Silo data is data people/departments don’t want to share for fear of losing power or control. Today’s machine learning techniques also require data to be in a specific format and ‘clean’. Creating new data allows it to be more readily formatted and conditioned prior to saving.
This isn’t just about location data. It includes physical quantities such as smaller-scale movement (accelerometer), temperature, humidity, air pressure, light and magnetism (hall effect), proximity, heart rate and fall detection. Our conversations with beacon manufacturers tell us beacons are currently being developed that detect more nuanced quantities such as colour, gas and UV. Some beacons already have general purpose input/output (GPIO) such that custom beacons can can already detect anything for which there’s an electronic sensor.
So why Bluetooth beacons rather than other electronics with the same sensors? Here are the main reasons: