Author: Support

Cow Positioning with iBeacon Technology

There’s a video at YouTube on the installation of Raspberry Pi based beacon detectors in a cow shed to detect the position of cows.

Beacon detectors

Beacon on a cow

Beacons can, in fact, do a lot more than just determine location. For example, it’s possible to track extra things such as temperature, humidity and unexpected movement. In the cow shed case, hall effect beacon sensors can be put on gates to alert when gates are open/closed when they shouldn’t be. The location data can be used to provide geofencing to alert when things, people or animals enter or leave specific areas.

Read more about Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) using beacons.

Beacons in Times Square

If you are thinking about using beacons for hospitality/events then you might like to take a look at Mr Beacon’s latest video interview with Kyle Wright from The Shubert Organization. They are the largest theatre owner on Broadway and have beacons covering their theatres and 80% of Times Square.

Their beacons require apps and they have been experimenting with partnering with 3rd party apps from travel, airline and credit card companies as well as having their own app. Initially, their own app was a challenge because few people had spare time to download when they arrive at a theatre. However, covering such a large number of venues and Time Square, with the large footfall, has made it easier to get their beacon detection into the 3rd party apps.

This is an interesting insight in that, if you control a compelling destination, you don’t necessarily need your own app but might have the clout to piggy back another organisation’s app that’s more likely to be on peoples’ phones.

Making Sense of Indoor Location

There’s a recent research paper on Indexing for Moving Objects in Multi-Floor Indoor Spaces That Supports Complex Semantic Queries. It says humans spend 87% of their time in indoor spaces such as private residences and office buildings and it’s becoming more important to be able to derive meaning from indoor location.

The paper explains how outdoor moving object management technology, which is very mature, cannot be applied to indoor spaces. Instead you need software that not only understands floors but also multi-floors and inter-floor (elevators and stairs) cells. The paper describes an index that can store indoor moving objects in multi-floor indoor spaces that can support 3D spatial queries.

Happy Bubbles for Home Automation

If you are interested in using beacons in home automation, it’s worth looking at Happy Bubbles. It’s hardware and a server that allows you to automate things happening in response to beacons being detected.

The concept is very similar to using a gateway with our generic beacons. In fact, the Happy Bubble ethos is similar to our own:

“Happy Bubbles is a different kind of IoT company. The happiest bubbles are the ones you create for yourself, not ones that others force you into. We believe that the products you purchase are your own and should be accountable to you, not the company that made them. … They are designed to run on your own network and not rely on other people’s ‘cloud’ services unless you want them to. Know exactly what you’re getting and what it’s doing on your network.”

How to Set Up iB003N Motion Triggered Broadcast?

The iB003N has an accelerometer that can be used to cause this beacon to only broadcast when it has been moved. This can be used to save battery power or as an alert that something, that shouldn’t move, has been moved. For example, we have a customer putting them on warehouse racking legs to detect when the forklift truck has crashed into them.

The iB003N manufacturer documentation on motion triggered broadcast is split over many sections of the user guide making understanding setup harder than it needs to be. In fact, it’s very simple. Connect to the beacon using the eBeacon app and set Service 0xFF70, Characteristic 0x2A80 (the beacon state) to 0x04. The beacon will now only transmit when moved.

New Data Logger Beacon in Stock

We have the new iB004-PLUS SHT Logger beacon in stock. It stores up to 200 temperature and humidity data over a user defined period of 1 to 120 minutes.

As with the non-logging iB004-PLUS, it has a large battery and sends the battery level in the advertising data. The current temperature and humidity can also be extracted from the advertising data without connecting to the beacon.

Beacon Locating Accuracy

There’s a useful article by Steffen von Bünau of Kontakt on Real Time Location Systems (RTLS). Steffen says:

“Accuracy is an expensive vanity metric unless it is necessary to get the job done.”

Most scenarios don’t usually need very accurate positioning and creating unnecessarily accurate systems is expensive. Steffen doesn’t say why they are expensive but one of the article’s comments provides an answer. Ultra wideband based RTLS is expensive compared to Bluetooth LE.

Also, accurate systems tend to need calibration that’s time consuming and costly in human resource. Calibration implies tuning to a particular physical and wireless environment. If the environment changes then so might the calibration.

The required accuracy of a RTLS should be derived from the business requirements.

Singapore Heritage Trail

There’s a new heritage trail of Little India in Singapore that uses Physical Web beacons to guide visitors through unique facts and stories, historical photographs, and crowd-sourced content.

The article on their web site is a great example how you can a) provide clear instructions on how to use the Physical Web and b) provide an incentive to start using. In the case of the trail there’s a contest. If you use your mobile device to access the Little India Physical Web Experience you can redeem a gift.

Samsung Browser Brings the Physical Web

There’s an interesting article by Peter O’Shaughnessy, Developer Advocate for Samsung on Bringing the real world to your browser with CloseBy. It describes how Samsung’s web browser detects Physical Web beacons. It works in a similar way to Google’s Chrome/Android in that it uses a proxy server to get and cache information (the title) of destination web addresses.

While it’s good to see the Physical Web expanding, we can’t help but question what this means for multiple notifications. Will Google and Samsung be both providing notifications for the same Physical Web beacon?