IoT Projects with Bluetooth Low Energy

Our article on Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT) provides short summary how to use Bluetooth for IoT.

If you need a more rigorous description take a look at the book IoT Projects with Bluetooth Low Energy. It covers the fundamental aspects of Bluetooth Low Energy scanning, services, and characteristics. It goes on to describe examples of how to monitor health data, perform indoor navigation and use the Raspberry Pi for Bluetooth solutions. The book’s code is also available on GitHub.

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Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring

In a previous post we asked ‘What is Productivity?’ and shared how the first wave of IT productivity related to cloud computing, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) was only taken up by the top 5% frontier companies.

We explained how IoT, 4IR and AI machine learning will improve productivity but again, likely only for frontier companies. The difference this time is that the newer technologies will have more far reaching consequences. The frontier companies will further extend their reach over the laggards. The majority of the 5% are large companies with large budgets who are able to engage consultances such as IBM, Deloitte, Atos, PwC, WiPro, Accenture and KPMG. But what of the small to medium enterprises (SMEs)? Can they compete?

In most countries, a large proportion of companies are small to medium size. For example, in the UK, the Office for National Statistics says 98.6% of manufacturers are (SMEs). These organisations are more price sensitive and usually don’t have the luxury of significant financial resources for engaging the top consultancies and implementing their expensive solutions. Small and medium sized organisations have previously found it difficult to digitise due to the lack of availability of reasonably priced solutions.

However, solutions doesn’t have to be expensive. Low cost sensors such as Bluetoooth beacons, motion cameras, consumer AR can be combined with affordable cloud services to create solutions on a ‘shoestring’ budget. This is the aim of the University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham’s ‘Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring’ initiative. The Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) is helping manufacturers benefit from digitalisation without excessive cost and risk. View the project’s latest news and communicate with them via Twitter.

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Bluetooth Mesh for Industrial IoT (IIoT)

There’s an informative video presentation on the Bluetooth SIG web site on Simplifying Multi-Vendor Mesh and Sensor Networks. It provides an introduction to Bluetooth mesh and explains the ways in which it can provide for Industrial IoT (IIoT).

To add to this, Bluetooth Mesh is suitable for use on the factory floor where the environment can be electrically noisy. Standard Bluetooth Mesh uses advertising on several channels rather than (GATT) connections so as to provide for more reliable communication in environments with wireless interference.

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Bluetooth Mesh and IIoT in Factories and Warehouses

Dialog Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the SoC chip in some beacons, has an informative article on How Bluetooth Mesh and IIoT are Reimagining Factories and Warehouses. It explains how the recent introduction of Bluetooth mesh has created new opportunities in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

“The manufacturing industry is absolutely ripe for potential with Bluetooth mesh”

IDC

“Industrial sensors and smart buildings among other use cases, are expected to outpace the overall Bluetooth LE market by 3X through 2022”

Research and Markets

The article mentions preventive maintenance, air quality sensing, asset tracking, robot control systems and traditional air conditioning as possible applications for Bluetooth Mesh. However, a key insight is that once a mesh network is in place it can be used for applications beyond those originally envisaged.

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IoT Priority and Asset Tracking

Gartner has a new report Hype Cycle for the Internet of Things 2019, in which they say:

“The Priority Matrix shows that many IoT technologies are 5 years from mainstream adoption. However only one innovation profile will reach maturity in 2 years, indoor location for assets.

So why is ‘indoor location for assets’ more likely to achieve mainstream adoption sooner than other technologies? It’s because there are clear benefits for most companies and off-the-shelf software such as our BeaconRTLS™ is already available.

Our work with companies shows they are nevertheless cautious. Companies are taking time to understand the competing asset tracking technologies and are performing, sometimes lengthy, trials to determine how new systems will integrate with existing systems. They are considering the implications of SAAS vs on-premise solutions, the availability of second-sourced beacon hardware and the compromises of accuracy vs system complexity and cost.

Why Bluetooth is Perfect for the Industrial IoT (IIoT)

U-Blox has a useful article on Seven reasons why Bluetooth is perfect for the Industrial IoT, echoing some of our observations on Bluetooth LE on the Factory Floor. The article explains why Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems and networks should consider Bluetooth as the communications infrastructure.

As U-Blox mentions, there’s predicted to be 5.2 billion Bluetooth device shipments by 2022. This data is from the latest Bluetooth SIG/ABI research:

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How to Start Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation

There’s lots said about the advantages of Industry 4.0 or Digital Transformation and the associated new technologies but it’s a lot harder to apply this to the context of a business that has legacy equipment and no real way of knowing where to start.

Our previous article on productivity explained how, historically, digital transformation has been only been implemented in the top 5% ‘frontier’ companies. These have tended to be very large companies with large R&D budgets that have enabled customised digital solutions. More recently, the availability of less expensive sensors and software components have extended opportunities to the SME companies. These companies are already realising gains in profitability, customer experience and operational efficiency. Unlike previous technologies, such as CRM, the newer technologies such as IoT and AI are more transformative. Companies that don’t update their processes risk being outranked by their competition with a greater possibility of going out of business. But where do you start?

The place to start is not technology but instead something you and your colleagues fortunately have lots of experience of : Your company. Take an honest look at your processes and work out the key problems that, if solved, would achieve the greatest gains. You might have ignored problems or inefficiencies for years or decades because they were thought to be insolvable. Technology might now be able to solve some of these problems. So what kind of problems? Think in terms of bottlenecks, costly workrounds, human effort-limited tasks, stoppages, downtimes, process delays, under-used equipment and even under-used people. Can you measure these things and react? Can you predict they are about to happen? This is where sensing comes in.

The next stage is connectivity. You will almost certainly need to upgrade or expand your WiFi and/or Ethernet network. It can be impractical to put sensors on everything and everyone and connect everything by WiFi/Ethernet. Instead, consider Bluetooth LE and sensor beacons to provide a low cost, low power solution for the last 50 to 100m. Bluetooth mesh can provide site-wide connectivity.

Initially implement a few key improvements that offer good payback for the effort (ROI). The improvements in efficiency, productivity, reduced costs and even customer experience should be enough to convince stakeholders to expand and better plan the digital transformation. This involves replacement of inefficient equipment and inefficient processes using, for example, robotics and 3D printing. It also involves analysing higher order information combined from multiple sources and using more advanced techniques such as AI machine learning to recognise and detect patterns to detect, classify and predict. This solves problem complexity beyond that able to be solved by the human mind or algorithmic program created by a programmer.

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SensorCognition™ – Machine Learning Sensor Data at the Edge

The traditional IoT strategy of sending all data up to the cloud for analysis doesn’t work well for some sensing scenarios. The combination of lots of sensors and/or frequent updates leads to lots of data being sent to the server, sometimes needlessly. The server and onward systems usually only need to now about abnormal situations. The data burden manifests itself as lots of traffic, lots of stored data, lots of complex processing and significant, unnecessary costs.

The processing of data and creating of ongoing alerts by a server can also imply longer delays that can be too long or unreliable for some time-critical scenarios. The opposite, doing all or the majority of processing near the sensing is called ‘Edge’ computing. Some people think that edge computing might one day become more normal as it’s realised that the cloud paradigm doesn’t scale technically or financially. We have been working with edge devices for a while now and can now formally announce a new edge device with some unique features.

Another problem with IoT is every scenario is different, with different inputs and outputs. Most organisations start by looking for a packaged, ready-made solution to their IoT problem that usually doesn’t exist. They tend to end up creating a custom coded solution. Instead, with SensorCognition™ we use pre-created modules that we ‘wire’ together, using data, to create your solution. We configure rather than code. This speeds up solution creation, providing greater adaptability to requirements changes and ultimately allows us to spend more time on your solution and less time solving programming problems.

However, the main reason for creating SensorCognition™ has been to provide for easier machine learning of sensor data. Machine learning is a two stage process. First data is collected, cleaned and fed into the ‘learning’ stage to create models. Crudely speaking, these models represent patterns that have been detected in the data to DETECT, CLASSIFY, PREDICT. During the production or ‘inference’ stage, new data is fed through the models to gain real-time insights. It’s important to clean the new data in exactly the same way as was done with the learning stage otherwise the models don’t work. The traditional method of data scientists manually cleaning data prior to creating models isn’t easily transferable to using those same models in production. SensorCognition™ provides a way of collecting sensor data for learning and inference with a common way of cleaning it, all without using a cloud server.

Sensor data and machine learning isn’t much use unless your solution can communicate with the outside world. SensorCognition™ modules allow us to combine inputs such as MQTT, HTTP, WebSocket, TCP, UDP, Twitter, email, files and RSS. SensorCognition™ can also have a web user interface, accessible on the same local network, with buttons, charts, colour pickers, date pickers, dropdowns, forms, gauges, notifications, sliders, switches, labels (text), play audio or text to speech and use arbitrary HTML/Javascript to view data from other places. SensorCognition™ processes the above inputs and provides output to files, MQTT, HTTP(S), Websocket, TCP, UDP, Email, Twitter, FTP, Slack, Kafka. It can also run external processes and Javascript if needed.

With SensorCognition™ we have created a general purpose device that can process sensor data using machine learning to provide for business-changing Internet of Things (IoT) and ‘Industry 4.0’ machine learning applications. This technology is available as a component of BeaconZone Solutions.

Industry 4.0 Platform

The February 2019 edition of ComputingEdge magazine from IEEE has an article on From Raw Data to Smart Manufacturing (pdf – current and back issues freely available).

The article describes what they call a ‘Semantic Web of Things for Industry 4.0 (SWeTI) platform’. Although it’s very useful, it’s less of a platform in the software sense and more of an ecosystem or model.

The platform describes usecases, tools and techniques for smart applications. Using this model, BeaconZone operates in the Device, Edge and Data Analytic layers. We provide for smart devices and tools, gateways, storage, machine learning (ML) and analytics.

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Reducing Costs with Predictive Maintenance

The Nordic blog has an informative post on How IoT-Based Predictive Maintenance Can Reduce Costs. It explains how connected sensors can save maintenance costs through reduced downtime. The post provides some examples from the power industry and explains how the same techniques can be used in the tools, retail, distribution and physical infrastructure industries.

As the post mentions, the challenge is how to scale this up. We are told IoT is the solution. Here at BeaconZone, we don’t believe IoT is always the solution, especially where there’s a requirement for higher sensor sampling frequencies. There’s too much data, too much data transfer and too much server processing. It really doesn’t scale. Apart from the waste and cost of these resources, the latency of triggering events based on the data is too high. Instead, look to so called ‘edge’ or ‘fog’ computing where more processing is done nearer the sensors and only pertinent data is sent to other systems.

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