Category: Gateways

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.”

Google’s Proximity Beacon API

Most beacon platforms are fairly limited in that they are designed around retail marketing scenarios. If you are creating a non-retail marketing solution you might want to look into Google’s little publicised Proximity Beacon API. It allows you to register beacons and have arbitrary data, called attachments, associated with them. What’s more, it supports the registration of iBeacon as well as Eddystone beacons and you can use it free of charge.

The usual usecase is setup via Google’s console followed by update from apps detecting beacons. Android and iOS example are available.

It’s not always apps that are used to detect beacons. For example, you might have a single board computer such as the Raspberry Pi or Bluetooth-WiFi gateway detecting beacons and a web front end managing and monitoring the beacons. Google also provides example scripts that show how other entities can be used to register, list and filter beacons. Alternatively, other entities might even call these scripts.

The storing of arbitrary data allows the proximity Beacon API to be used for scenarios beyond retail marketing such as sensing with sensor beacons and real time locating (RTLS).

System-based Beacon Detection

The majority of beacon-based solutions are app-based and trigger information to be displayed to the user in response to being near specific beacons. If you read many platform provider sites you might think that’s all beacons can do. However, beacons are a technology and not solution. Beacons provide for many types of solution.

Another type of solution is the accounting for things (with beacons attached) within a larger system. Examples include class registration, stock checking, asset tracking, security and lone worker positioning. In these cases the thing that detects beacons can be can be an app or hardware.

The app can be relatively simple and scan for particular beacons and save information to a file and/or send them on to server. We recently implemented such a system for Malvern Instruments, with custom pre-configured beacons, that also allows search for particular ‘lost’ beacons:

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In the cases where the beacon detection doesn’t or shouldn’t move around, it’s possible to use gateways to forward on detected beacon data to a server.

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IGS01 Wifi Beacon Gateway

Several of our clients are using this type of architecture to provide for automatic human registration/rollcall type solutions.

We believe even greater opportunities exist for IoT scenarios where sensor data in beacon advertising can be automatically forwarded on to servers.

Wireless iBeacon Receiver in Stock

We now have the AprilBrother Wireless iBeacon Receiver in stock.

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The Wireless iBeacon Receiver receives (any manufacturer) beacon advertising broadcasts and sends them on via MQTT via your WiFi access point. It can scan for multiple beacons at the same time and provides updates up to 1 per second.

This device can be used to monitor the health of beacons or in other usecases whether beacons have come into range or out of range.  It can also be used with sensor beacons in IoT-type scenarios.