Author: Support

The State of IoT (and Beacons)

There’s an interesting new video by Mr Beacon on the state of IoT. It’s an interview with ex-Intel Aidoo Osei with insights on the business side of IoT.

Aidoo talks of IoT being a technology searching for a meaningful problem people are willing to pay to solve. The important part is ‘pay’, as many initiatives such as smart cities require a thorough understanding of how these things might be financed. Also, for many IoT technology providers, there’s a tension between providing open, inter-operable systems and wanting to own the stack.

Aidoo provides an upbeat view of beacons. He thinks beacons are simple at the moment because phones/apps are more capable. As beacons become more used as components of IoT systems, there’s an opportunity for them to be more complex.

While Aidoo didn’t mention this, one example of beacons becoming more complex is the use of mesh networking.

How Does Using Beacons for Tracking Compare with the Use of RFID?

The main difference between beacons and RFID is the range. RFID only works up to 1m while beacons typically reach 50m to 100m, even more for specialist beacons. It’s also possible to get an indication of distance to the beacon whereas with RFID it’s just ‘seen’ or ‘not seen’.

RFID tags are less expensive than beacons. However, as the range of beacons is much larger, fewer readers are required thus compensating for the extra cost. It’s also possible to totally cover a much larger area.

New Report on The Proximity & Location Industry

Proximity.directory has a new report on the State Of The Proximity & Location Industry. It’s great to see proximity.directory reports moving beyond retail marketing into asset tracking.

The report gives a great overview of how asset tracking works, the benefits, provides some case studies and lots of charts.

“Hospitals can save hundreds of
thousands dollars a year with an
immediate ROI of 275%”

Download the report.

Research Paper on Using Bluetooth for Indoor Locating

There’s a paper by Mariusz Kaczmarek, Jacek Ruminski and Adam Bujnowski of Gdansk University of Technology on the Accuracy analysis of the RSSI BLE SensorTag signal for indoor localization purposes (pdf).

They studied the radio signal from multiple Texas Instruments SensorTag CC2650 devices in order to determine if it could be used to determine location.

They concluded:

“Given the large number of factors governing the received RSSI, calibration is unlikely to be able to compensate for all of
them, leading us to conclude that there is an inherent limit to the accuracy of a BLE positioning system especially when multiple devices are used.”

They suggest:

…that instead of using a single RSSI measurement to estimate distance, try using the average or median value of N measurements collected on the same spot (at least N>20) so that you can reduce the effect of small scale fading.

Bluetooth Mesh Solution Choices

Although much of the Beacon related PR at the moment is centred around the availability of the Bluetooth SIG Mesh there are other mesh solutions some of which were referenced in our previous post.

Two other mesh solutions that are catching our eye at the moment are Wirepas and Fruitymesh because they provide more at the application level.

Wirepas provides for remote monitoring and configuration of beacons allowing you to set things such as advertisement interval, transmit power, used channels and the beacon payload. It also allows monitoring of beacon battery levels and firmware update. The mesh supports enhanced beacon security to protect against beacon spoofing and piggybacking.

Fruitymesh is open source software provided by M-Way Solutions GmbH in Germany. It allows you to configure beacon advertising, set up Bluetooth scanning, perform I/O and report beacon status, all via the mesh.

What sets these two solutions apart from the Bluetooth SIG mesh is that they are more optimised for use on battery powered devices.

We hope to be supplying beacons with Bluetooth SIG mesh, Wirepas and Fruitymesh in the near future as no one solution is suitable for all scenarios.

Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.

New Bluetooth LE Python Module

One of the difficulties of developing Beacon applications on (usually Linux) single single board computers (SBCs) is the difficulty in programming Bluetooth LE. We previously gave a few pointers.

To make things much easier, there’s a new pure Python module python-hcipy written using only the Python standard library for interacting with the Bluetooth HCI.

“The primary benefit of using this module is the lack of having any dependency on: PyBluez Python & C based module, the bluetoothd service or D-Bus; this module just uses the standard Python socket API.”

It currently supports BLE Adapter controller and querying, advertising, GATT Client (Central role),GATT Server (Peripheral role) and scanning.